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THE, PEACE OF ‘REASON IN 
CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 





THE PLACE OF REASON IN 
CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 


FOUR LECTURES, DELIVERED BEFORE 
THE GENERAL THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
NEW YORK. TOGETHER WITH A PAPER ON 
EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
AN DCH RTS TAN) Ex PIG R TE N Gis) By 


THE REV. LEONARD'HODGSON, M.A. 


FELLOW AND DEAN OF DIVINITY OF ST. MARY MAGDALEN COLLEGE 
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 





Pe ve LON AND COMPANY 
NEW YORK MCMXXV 


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CONTENTS 


PAGE 
THe Prace or Reason IN CHRISTIAN 
APOLOGETIC 


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LEcTURE | 


Lecture II - a . ! 17 
Lecture Ill - - - - an 
Lecture 1V_ - - - 7 SI 
EXPERIENCE, RELIGIouS EXPERIENCE, AND 
CurISTIAN EXPERIENCE - ~ 67 


INDEX - i - . i 85 


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PREBACE 


Tue following pages are the result of an invitation 
to give a short course of lectures at the General 
Theological Seminary in New York. That invitation 
gave me an opportunity to attempt to sketch certain 
lines of thought which have been the chief interest 
of my mind for some years. I am well aware that 
the canvas on which I have been working is far too 
small for any adequate treatment of the subject 
with which I have tried to deal, especially in the 
concluding lecture. If time and circumstances permit 
I hope in the coming years to devote myself to the 
working out in greater detail of the arguments which 
are here so briefly suggested. 

I should like to take this opportunity of expressing 
my thanks to Dean Fosbrooke and all those members 
of the General Theological Seminary whose invitation 
has encouraged me to prepare these lectures, whose 
hospitality I am now enjoying in anticipation as I 
write, and shall have enjoyed in fact before these 
words are published. I must also thank the Editor 
of the Interpreter for permission to reprint the 
appended Paper on ‘Christian Experience,’ and 
the Rev. F. H. Brabant, of Wadham College, for his 


kindness in reading the proofs for publication. 


i balan G 
OXFORD. 
8th December, 1924. 


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The Place of Reason in Christian 
Apologetic 

Pel ibet ty 

N 1923 Dr. Gore published the concluding 


volume of his trilogy on The Reconstruction of 

Belief, and early in the following year a some- 
what surprising review of that work appeared in the 
London Church Times. The reviewer, while faintly 
praising Dr. Gore for the skill with which he had 
constructed a reasoned apologia for the Christian 
faith, devoted most of his space to elaborating the 
point that such labour was wasted time and energy. 
The Christians of the twentieth century, he urged, 
had grown out of the rationalistic age in which 
Dr. Gore still dwelt; they had learned that religion 
neither could nor need have any rational justification, 
but has its own canons and is its own justification. 
Reference was made to Dr. Rudolf Otto of Marburg, 
whose work Das Heilige1 had been issued in an 
English translation in 1923,? as the master at whose 
feet this lesson had been learned.? 

This review did not attract much notice. No one 
troubled to waste powder and shot over what was 
apparently the work of a ‘man of straw.’ But straw 
may be useful to show which way the wind is blowing, 
and such a review, though unimportant in itself, may 

1 Breslau, 1917. 

2 Otto: The Idea of the Holy. (Oxford University Press, 1923.) 


3 The Church Times, Vol. XCI., No. 3188. (London: G. J. Palmer 
& Sons, Ltd. Feb. 29, 1924.) 


2 THE PLACE OF REASON 


have importance as a symptom of the effect produced 
by Dr. Otto’s book. I propose, therefore, to pass from 
pupil to master and to consider briefly whether Zhe 
Idea of the Holy has sounded the death-knell of 
rational apologetic. 

We will begin our examination of Dr. Otto’s work 
with the latter part of his book, in which he uses the 
word ‘divination’ to denote man’s faculty for 
recognising the divine in its manifestations of itself, 
and maintains that this is an a priori faculty... He 
carefully explains what he means by that statement. 
It is not that every man does, as a matter of fact, 
exercise this power of recognition, but that in every 
man, gua man, there is the potentiality of the exercise 
of this power, although it is actualized in some more 
than others.2 He illustrates his meaning by reference 
to the aesthetic faculty, where similarly all men have 
a potentiality which in some is actualized in appre- 
ciation of beauty and in others rises to the level of 
the creative artist. Parallel to that insight through: 
which man can appreciate beauty is the insight 
through which he can recognize the ‘ numinous,’ or 
the self-manifestation of the divine. It is this which 
he calls ‘ divination.’ 

What has chiefly impressed Dr. Otto in the aesthetic 
faculty and ,has led him to draw this parallel is, I 
think, its 1mmediacy. The artist’s appreciation of 
beauty is not the application of a system of rules or 


1 Op.ctt. Chapters XVIII~XXI. (The references throughout are to the 
English Translation.) 


* Op. cit. pp. 181-2. Cp. pp. 116-120. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 3 


canons, but an immediate act of insight of which no 
analysis can be given and which cannot be defined in 
terms of anything other than itself. If asked by 
another to explain why he has said ‘ This is beautiful ’ 
the artist is ultimately driven to say, ‘ Look! Can’t 
you see it for yourself? If not, no words of mine 
can show it to you. They may be able to help you 
to see what I see as I see it, but only when you see 
it for yourself will you really understand what I 
meant.” Now before we go any further in the 
examination of Dr. Otto’s book, I would ask you to 
consider very carefully whether what is here said 
about aesthetic appreciation is not equally true both of 
moral judgement and of the intellectual apprehension 
of truth. Neglecting for the moment the former of 
these, we will concentrate our attention on the latter. 
To many minds the phrase ‘ the exercise of reason ’ 
often seems to suggest a process of some appreciable 
length, in which the mind is forging a chain of argu- 
ment, dealing the while with more or less clearly 
defined concepts. The obvious example would be 
the classic syllogism in which the mind, dealing with 
the concepts Socrates, manhood, and mortality, 
argues, ‘ All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, there- 
fore Socrates is mortal.’ But let us look at this 
argument more closely and ask precisely how the 
conclusion is arrived at. Surely the only possible 
account of the matter is this: we must have the two 
premisses simultaneously before our mind, and then, 
by an immediate act of insight (parallel to the artist’s 
‘This is beautiful’) we see that the conclusion is 


4 THE PLACE OF REASON 


involved in them. If similarly we ask how the 
premisses were established, we shall find that for each 
there must have been ultimately one or more such 
immediate acts of apprehension. The fact surely is 
that the primary function of human reason is not the 
construction of chains of argument, but the recognition 
of truth. Definitions may help, chains of argument 
may help—they are the marshalling of further 
material for insight in order that it may be presented 
to the mind—but these depend for their existence on 
prior immediate acts of recognition of truth, and only 
exist in order to make possible further acts of the 
Same nature. | 7 

But, it may be said, if we are to accept as our 
definition of reason that it is the power to recognise 
truth when presented to the mind, does not this 
presuppose our ability to answer the age-old question 
‘What is truth?’ ‘ What,’ you may say, ‘is your 
definition of truth?’ I answer that there can be no 
such definition, for a simple and adequate reason. 
To define a thing is to describe it in terms of something 
other than itself. When we see that, we see that if 
anything is ultimate it is for that very reason in- 
definable, for its ultimateness (if I may coin the word) 
implies that there is nothing else in terms of which it 
can be described. To anyone who asked me to 
define ‘ truth,’ I should reply, ‘ I cannot define truth, 
but you know as well as I what I mean by the word ; 
you could not argue with me unless you did.’ Let 
me show you what I mean by a simple illustration. 
Let us suppose that I gave as an illustration of what is 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 5 


true the statement ‘ The shortest distance between 
two points is the straight line joining them,’ and that 
a man to whom I gave that instance objected that 
owing to the researches of Dr. Einstein that statement 
could no longer be accepted as true. His objection 
would surely involve as clear an appreciation of the 
distinction between truth and falsehood in his mind 
as I had in mine. 

All argument, indeed all rational thought, pre- 
supposes the existence of truth and on the part of man 
the power to discover it. Dr. Otto would, I under- 
stand from his book, agree with this, and also with the 
further assertion that man has parallel powers of 
apprehending right and wrong in moral judgements 
and beauty and ugliness in aesthetic.1. The further 
question arises whether the exercise of these powers 
is the recognition of truth, goodness and beauty 
objectively existent and presented to the mind, or 
the creation, the objectifying of a threefold content 
of the mind itself. This latter theory, if I understand 
him rightly, is the teaching of the Italian philosopher 
Croce. Either theory is a possible account of the 
activity of the human mind: what is at issue is the 
nature of what we should commonly call the objects 
of our experience. In the one case they would, in 
Dr. Otto’s language, merely supply a stimulus to the 
mind, provoking it, so to speak, to put forth its hidden 
treasures. In the other they would have what I may 
perhaps call a sacramental reality, being particulars 
in and through which the universals truth, beauty, 


1 Cp. op. cit. pp. 44, 116 ff, 179 ff. 


6 THE: PLACE OF REASON 


and goodness are revealed to and recognised by the 
human mind. I may as well say at once that I am 
myself convinced of the truth of this latter way of 
looking at things, and that the specific activity of the 
human mind is the recognition of the universals truth, 
beauty, and goodness in the particular instances of 
them presented in this changing world in time and 
space ; but I am not sure that Dr. Otto is not right 
in attempting to combine both theories, and to see 
in the life of the human mind both a recognition of 
objective manifestations of God and an unfolding of the 
Spiritus sanctus internus, or, 1f I may say so, the Logos, 
the ‘ Light which lighteneth every man coming into 
the world.’! In passing, let me remark that I find his 
exposition of his twofold point of view in this respect 
one of the most difficult things in Dr. Otto’s book. I 
cannot see that he has provided any criterion by 
which to distinguish between mere stimuli of the 
faculty of divination, and veritable manifestations 
of ‘the numinous.’ But I shall have to say more of 
this later on.? 

One further point. If the immediate apprehension 
of truth is the primary activity of reason, and if 
ultimates are indefinable, then the highest activity 
of reason is the immediate intuition of the indefinable. 
It is thus that traditionally the rational activity of 
God is described as apprehension of the totum simul. 

We can now proceed with our examination of Dr. 
Otto’s work. He would agree with me, I take it, 
in holding that these three powers of apprehending 


1 St. John i. 9. * See below, pp. 10, 26. 
Pp 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 7 


truth, beauty and goodness are native to the human 
mind. The aim of his book is to go further and to 
ascribe also to the human mind a fourth power 
parallel to these, the power of ‘ divining the numinous.’ 
The earlier part of the book 1s devoted to describing 
what he means by ‘the numinous.’ It is that 
element in things. which produces in us an eerie 
sensation of being in the presence of something at 
once mysterious, aweful, and fascinating. It is in 
such sensations that the divine is specifically mani- 
fested, and it is such sensations which are the essence 
of religion.1 These manifestations are manifestations 
of a non-rational element in things, and the activity 
of ‘divination’ is a non-rational activity.2. The 
religious life of man is, therefore, autonomous, im- 
mune from rational criticism and incapable of rational 
justification.’ 

Now what, precisely, does Dr. Otto mean by 
‘non-rational’? There seem to be two strands in 
the texture of his definition: according to one, 
anything which cannot be defined is non-rational,' 
according to the other the mark of the non-rational 
is that it produces in the mind an emotion and not 
aconcept.6 I have called these two strands, but I am 
not sure that Dr. Otto would agree with this, for he 
seems to me to confuse the non-definable with the 
emotional, to hold that unless and until a thing is 
defined it cannot be said to be rationally appre- 


1 Op. cit. pp. 4, 6, 58, 72-112 (especially pp. 99-100), 120, 128-9, 135, 
144-6. 

* Op. cit. pp. 2,5, 60, 113-4 etc. ; 147-178. °* Op. cit. pp. 1, 5, 60-1: 

3 Op. cit. pp. 175-8. 5 Ob. cit. pp. 8-10, 140. 


8 THE PLACE OF REASON 


hended.t But if, as we have seen, it is the mark of 
all ultimates, even those which are the objects of 
reason in the narrowest sense of the word, to be 
indefinable, we cannot admit that ‘ the numinous’ is 
non-rational simply because it is indefinable. We 
turn our attention, then, to its other characteristic, its 
being a matter of emotion. Let us grant that Dr. 
Otto has made a valuable contribution to religious 
thought in the elaborate care with which he has 
isolated and analysed certain specific emotions of 
wonder, awe, and fascination. The question remains, 
how far is he justified in arguing from these to a non- 
rational element in reality which is specifically divine ? 

A non-rational element in reality : what precisely 
does this mean? It is very difficult to answer this 
question. An illustration may help to make clear 
what is involved. A man may do something non- 
rational, may act in a way which he himself would 
describe as non-rational, or even irrational; for 
example, speak abusively to a friend as a result of 
being in a bad temper. Here we have an action 
which is non-rational as being the result of a non- 
rational emotion. But we do not look on either the 
action or the emotion as having no rational relation 
to the rest of the universe. There must have been 
something .to account for the man’s fit of temper, 
some annoying piece of news, oran unhealthy condition 
of his liver. A non-rational act is not an act of which 
no rational account can be given, but an act whose 
proximate source is to be found not in a rational 


1 See, e.g. of. cit. pp. 1-4, 140-1, 174. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 9 


determination but in a wave of non-rational emotion. 
Now what Dr. Otto argues for is a something in 
reality which is indefinable and produces in man an 
emotional response, something which is felt rather 
than rationally apprehended. But does he mean to 
maintain that that something stands itself in no 
rational connection with the rest of reality, that it is, 
so to speak, a gap—or rather many gaps—in the 
cosmos of the universe? I am afraid he does, for 
that seems to be necessary in order to make possible 
his favourite metaphor of reality as a fabric of rational 
and non-rational interwoven as warp and _ woof,} 
his whole theory of the schematization of the non- 
rational by the rational,? and his claim for religion 
to be beyond rational criticism or justification.® 
But surely, the presupposition of all thought is 
the universe as a rational whole. If there be any 
ultimately non-rational elements in it, any such gaps 
in its rational completeness, we have not a cosmos 
but a chaos, and it is futile for Dr. Otto or anyone else 
to attempt to maintain or refute any thesis whatsoever. 
There are passages in The Idea of the Holy which 
seem to show that Dr. Otto is not altogether com- 
fortable about the use of the term ‘ non-rational,’* 
and I cannot help thinking that he has been misled 
by his unfortunate identification of the non-rational 
with the indefinable. The term ‘ non-rational’ is, 
it seems to me, used equivocally in his book. Having 
established the existence of a non-rational something 


1 Op. cit. pp. 47, 120, 146. 3 Op. cit. pp. 176-8. 
2 Op. cit. pp. 46 ff, 144 ff. 4 Op. cit. pp. 60-1, 179. 


B 


IO THE PLACE OF REASON 


in the sense of something emotionally apprehended or 
indefinable, he then slips into using the term as 
meaning that of which no rational account can be 
given and which has no rational connection with the 
rest of the universe. 

This unfortunate identification of the indefinable 
with the non-rational is the reason why, as I mentioned 
earlier, Dr. Otto does not seem to be able to provide 
any criterion to distinguish between false and true 
manifestations of ‘the numinous.’! What I cannot 
but think to be his error is illustrated in a striking 
passage.2- When Plato in the second book of the — 
Republic lays down his tuzoi epi Oeodoyias, when 
Amos declares the righteousness of Jahweh, we 
have what I should call clear instances of rational 
insight, we have historically, in Greek and Hebrew 
thought respectively, the birth of rational religion. 
But for Dr. Otto these declarations are non-rational, 
being, as he puts it, ‘felt as something axiomatic, 
something whose inner necessity we feel-to be self- 
evident.’ It is because I think that his substitution 
of the word ‘ felt’ for such a phrase as ‘seen by rational 
insight ? is the key to what is unsatisfactory in his 
book that I have troubled you with the somewhat dry 
logical discussion which occupied the earlier portion 
of this lecture. 

There are, then, certain immediate acts of rational 
apprehension which, on account of their immediacy, 
Dr. Otto is misled into calling non-rational. But 
to have perceived this is not to have disposed 

' See above, p. 6 and below p. 26. 2 Op. cit. pp. 140 ff. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC II 


altogether of his ‘ divination of the numinous.’ There 
remain those elements in consciousness which he has 
so carefully described, which are genuinely not acts 
of rational apprehension, but emotional states, the 
states of wonder, awe, and fascination. What account 
shall we give of these, if we reject the theory that 
they are non-rational apprehensions of a non-rational 
element in the objective world ? 

Over and over again Dr. Otto attempts to elucidate 
what he means by ‘ divination of the numinous’ by 
illustrating it from aesthetic appreciation. It is easy 
to see why he chooses this illustration. In aesthetic 
appreciation we have an activity which zs other than 
the rational apprehension of truth, but which makes 
an equal claim to apprehend an objective element in 
the universe, beauty. Now we cannot ignore the 
fact that the admission of the autonomy of the 
aesthetic faculty in its own sphere does not necessitate 
belief in a gap in the rational cosmos of the universe 
in order that it may be given a fitting object on which 
to exercise itself. The granting of this autonomy 
has forced thinkers to allow for and to try to account 
for the existence of beauty in the universe, and to 
some this has appeared as a strong contributory 
argument for belief in God. It would be the suicide 
of thought to hold that the autonomy of the aesthetic 
faculty precludes the mind from any possibility of 
giving a rational account of its existence. 

If, then, Dr. Otto has established the fact in human. 


1 See, e.g., C. J. Shebbeare: The Challenge of the Universe. 
(S.P.C.K., 1918.) | 


12 THE PLACE OF REASON 


consciousness of an awareness of ‘the numinous,’ 
which is more akin to aesthetic appreciation than to 
the apprehension of truth, we need not postulate for 
its autonomy in its own sphere an impossibility of 
giving a rational account of it. We cannot excuse 
reason of the duty of enquiring whether such elements 
in consciousness are merely subjective illusions or 
true awareness of an objective element in reality, and, 
if it be the latter, of discovering its relation to the 
rest of the universe which, if we are to think at all, 
must be a rational whole. 

We will now turn our attention to another point in 
The [dea of the Holy, to Dr. Otto’s thesis that the 
objective ‘numinous’ is the specific manifestation 
of the divine, and that the awareness of it in human 
consciousness is the specifically religious element in 
the life of man. This provides at once a practical 
difficulty, for if what he says be true, then we must 
admit the existence of a class of men for whom no 
religion is possible, those who are not subject to these 
emotional experiences. Dr. Otto himself acknowledges 
the existence of such persons, but he does not discuss 
the question whether or no they can be Christians. 
Neither do I wish now to discuss this practical 
question, but, having mentioned it, to consider 
directly the theory which gives rise to it. 

There is an illuminating passage in Dr. Sorley’s 
Gifford Lectures which here deserves our attention.? 

1 OD. cit. pp. 53-6. 


* Sorley : Moral Values and the Idea of God, 2nd edition, pp. 305-7. 
(Cambridge University Press, 1921.) 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 13 


Dr. Sorley is considering the classical arguments for 
the existence of God. He points out the difference 
between the manner of approach to the question of 
God’s being which was characteristic of the days in 
which those arguments were first framed, and that 
which is characteristic of our own days. Then it was 
assumed that we knew what was meant by the word 
‘God.’ That word denoted a Being of certain 
definite characteristics, and the question was asked 
whether we could believe in the existence of such a 
Being. But now we start, as it were, from the other 
end. We try to understand the nature of the universe 
to which we belong, and then we ask whether the 
universe considered as a whole is such that we can 
ascribe to it such moral and personal characteristics 
as justify us in calling it God. This is a just and 
valuable observation, and it enables us at once to 
see the weak point in Dr. Otto’s thesis. To assert 
that the manifestations of ‘the numinous’ are 
specifically the manifestations of the divine is to 
slip back into the mediaeval point of view and to 
ignore that method of putting the question of God’s 
being which gives it meaning to-day. 

A few years ago there died in Oxford a teacher of 
philosophy to whom I and many others owe more 
than we can express, Professor John Cook Wilson. 
In an account of his life and work published in Mind 
shortly after his death, Mr. H. A. Prichard refers in 
a footnote + to an occasion on which he read a paper 


1 Mind, N.S. Vol. XXVIII., No. 111, p. 305. (Macmillan & Co., 
July, 1919.) 


14 THE PLACE OF REASON 


arguing for belief in God from the existence in human 
consciousness of the specific emotion of reverence. 
That paper has not, so far as I know, been published, 
and I was not myself fortunate enough to be present 
when it was read; I only know of it at second hand 
from some of the hearers in whose memory it has 
dwelt. I mention this paper, because from all 
accounts it must have been a striking anticipation of 
the contribution which Dr. Otto seems to me to have 
made to Christian apologetics, an anticipation made 
by one who would have repudiated entirely the sug- 
gestion that religious faith is above rational criticism 
or justification. It is one thing to say that the 
universe, considered as a whole, contains elements 
which justify us in speaking of God ; it is another to 
say that God is specifically the non-rational element 
in reality who cannot be the object of rational thought. 
The former I believe to have been the argument of 
Professor Cook Wilson ; the latter seems to me to be 
the position of Dr. Otto. If that is indeed what he 
means to maintain, then [ cannot but think that it is 
an untenable position. 

I have devoted this lecture to criticism of The 
Idea of the Holy because that book has been ap- 
pealed to to justify the abandoning of any attempt 
at rational Christian apologetic. It seemed worth 
while to enquire whether, on investigation, Dr. Otto’s 
work lays itself open to be appealed to in this manner, 
and if so, whether its authority can be accepted. 
We have seen that there are passages which deny 
the possibility of rational Christian apologetic, and 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 15 


passages which seem to involve an impossible theory 
of gaps in the rational coherence of the universe. But 
these elements in Dr. Otto’s thought we have found 
it necessary to reject, and it is precisely these which 
furnish the ground of appeal in the anti-rationalist 
cause. I should not like to close this lecture without 
a very sincere tribute to Dr. Otto, to the learning and 
insight displayed in his book, and to its importance. 
In drawing attention to a specific gamut of emotions 
which demand consideration as possibly direct aware- 
nesses of an element in reality which is neither truth, 
goodness, nor beauty, and in the elaborate care with 
which he has isolated and analysed these emotions, 
Dr. Otto has provided the student of Christian 
apologetics with food for thought for which he must 
always be thankful. If by calling these emotions 
and their objects ‘non-rational’? Dr. Otto merely 
means that they are indefinable and matters of 
emotion, we need not quarrel with him. If he 
intends us to read this definition into the term 
whenever it occurs, as is suggested in one passage of 
his book,! then perhaps both his anti-rationalist 
disciple, and I, his critic, owe him apologies for having 
misunderstood him. But I do not think that this 
can beso. Dr. Otto himself seems to have his doubts. 
He seems to waver between holding that moral 
thought is rational and non-rational, between holding 
that the ‘ schematizing of the numinous,’ as he calls 
it, by moral ideas is a rational and a non-rational 
process.2. It seems to me that the truest account of 
1 Op. cit. pp. 60,61. *Compare op. cit. pp. 46, 50, 77-8, 114-5, 140-1. 


16 THE PLACE OF REASON 


this process would be to call it, not the schematizing 
of the numinous by moral ideas, but the predicating 
of both numinous and moral attributes of the same 
subject, the ultimate reality, God. And this must 
surely be the work of reason, and as such both subject 
to rational criticism and only tenable if rationally 
justified. 

In conclusion, I should like to say a word about 
the function of Christian apologetics. Its aim is, 
surely, not to convert, but to justify conversion at 
the bar of reason. There are traces in Dr. Otto’s 
book of confusion between the aims of the apologist 
and of the converting preacher.1 Even if it be true 
that the aim of the latter must be to produce in others 
such emotional awareness as he experiences in his own 
consciousness, it does not follow that this is the whole 
duty of the former. The aim of the apologist must be 
to follow in the steps of the preacher, to reflect upon 
his work, and to consider whether the universe is 
such as to justify his faith and his works. ‘This must 
be a rational enquiry conducted by rational methods. 


1 Of. cit. pp. 7, 178. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 17 


TV 


X JE devoted our first lecture to an examin- 
ation of the theory that what is specifically 
religious is subjectively a non-rational 

element in consciousness and objectively a non- 

rational element in reality, religious experience being 

a union of these in an activity called ‘ divination 

of the numinous.’ As a result of that discussion we 

had better in this connection avoid the terms rational 
and non-rational, and say that ‘divination of the 
numinous’ means an emotional element in human 
consciousness bearing witness to a non-definable 
element in reality which can only thus, i.e. emotionally, 
be apprehended. We found it impossible to limit 
what we mean by ‘ God’ to what is apprehended in 
this manner, and we found it impossible to accept 
any theory which implies what we called gaps in the 
rational coherence of the universe. Our first task 
now is to seek to determine as accurately as we can 
how far, and in what sense, that which is called 
emotional must therefore be described as non-rational. 

We may surely in these days, without any laboured 
argument, agree to reject that so-called ‘ faculty 
psychology ’ for which the various elements in human 
consciousness are looked upon as functioning, so to 
speak, in watertight compartments. Man is a unity, 
and whether he be thinking, willing, or feeling it is 
the man as a whole who is engaged in each activity. 

We have no experience of what may be called an act 


18 THE PLACE OF REASON 


of pure sense-perception, but in our perceiving by 
the senses we are active as rational and conative 
beings, and what we perceive depends in a measure 
on the direction and the intensity of our attention as 
well as on the content and the rational character of 
our minds as weattend. Yet thought, will, and feeling 
are not the same; none of these activities can be 
reduced to, or defined in, terms of the others. 
We have each of us to recognise in himself a trinity 
in unity, a unity in which each element is absolutely 
distinct yet united in such a manner that there is an 
analogy to that ‘interpermeation ’ which, according 
to traditional Christian doctrine, obtains between the 
Persons in the Divine Trinity. 

It would surely be a falling back into that ‘ faculty 
psychology ’ of watertight compartments if we did 
not recognise the same unity of man when we think 
of him as metaphysician, as moralist, and as artist. 
The quest of truth, of goodness, and of beauty are 
distinct activities, none of which can be reduced to, 
or defined in terms of, the others; yet in whichever 
direction a man is engaged, it is the whole man who 
is active. 

What I wish now to maintain is that what is here 
subjectively true of the man in his various activities 
is also true of that objective reality with which we 
believe him to be dealing. If truth, goodness, and 
beauty are constituent elements of the truly real, 
then, for the universe to be one—as it surely must be, 
if we are to think at all,—its unity must be a harmony 
of these three, a harmony in which each, though it 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC IQ 


cannot be reduced to, or defined in terms of, the 
others, is yet not contradictory to the others. 

Truth, beauty, and goodness are the terms 
commonly used in this connection, but there is a 
difficulty about the use of the world ‘truth.’ It is 
aptly predicated of statements, judgements, opinions, 
doctrines, and similar things which may be true or 
false, but it is not so easy to see precisely what is 
meant by the attribution of truth to the ultimate 
reality as by that of beauty and goodness. This 
difficulty has led Mr. Oliver Quick to suggest that 
we should do better to speak of rationality, goodness 
and beauty as being the ultimate elements of reality, 
whose harmonious unity | am here trying to main- 
tain. Rationality is that quality in the universe 
which makes it knowable, which makes it possible 
for there to be a truth about it. We will adopt this 
suggestion of Canon Quick’s, and speak of rationality, 
goodness and beauty. 

It is inconceivable that these should ultimately 
be contradictory. They are not to be confused: it is 
as futile to apply rational or moral criteria in 
questions of art as it is to apply aesthetic in questions 
of rationality. But the ultimate reality must be a 
harmonious unity of the three. What I want to 
suggest is that in this harmonious unity there is an 
analogy to that interpermeation which we find in 
the being of man and believe to obtain in the Divine 
Trinity ; that though rationality is neither goodness 
nor beauty, it is yet both good and beautiful, and so 

1 See The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XXII. No. 1 (Oct. 1923), p. 127. 


20 THE PLACE OF REASON 


on with the other two. We need not, for the purpose 
of these lectures, discuss this thesis in all its bearings ; 
we will confine ourselves to an attempt to shew that 
it is justifiable to speak both of goodness and of 
beauty as rational. 

With regard to goodness our task is comparatively 
simple. It is not for nothing that Kant extends the 
use of the word ‘ reason’ to cover judgments both of 
truth and of morals, speaking of ‘ speculative reason ’ 
and ‘ practical reason’ respectively, or that the late 
Dean of Carlisle, Dr. Hastings Rashdall, has denied so 
convincingly that what we call conscience is merely 
an emotional faculty.1. But perhaps the interper- 
meation of jhe good by the rational can most clearly 
be exhibited by reference to Greek moral thought, 
for example, the discussion of the nature of courage 
in Plato’s Republic? where courage is defined as 
the maintenance of the right opinion on what things 
are and are not to be feared, and that in Aristotle’s 
Ethics, where courage is distinguished from cowardice 
and rashness.§ It is perhaps a typical deficiency of 
the Englishman to minimise the importance of the 
rational element in matters of conduct; to respect a 
man for doing what he believes to be right, but to 
ignore the possibility of what he calls his conscience 
leading him astray through neglect of rational con- 
sideration of the circumstances of his case. Moral 


theology is a tree that has never flourished on English 
soil. Yet it is a tree whose leaves are needed for the 


1 Is Conscience an Emotion ? (Houghton, 1914.) *#IV.420c.d. 
SUPICaAt i Srat i 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 21 


healing of the nations, and must wither if the strain of 
rationality is allowed to die out from the stock. 

To maintain the interpermeation of beauty by 
rationality is a less easy task, but I am indebted to 
Mr. C. J. Shebbeare for an illustration which shows 
that the suggestion of it 1s not without ground. It 
is possible to hum a few bars of music which any one 
of sufficient musical education will at once recognise as 
being characteristic of a certain composer, for example 
Handel. This involves the existence in art of generali- 
sations, in the case suggested of what may be called 
a Handelismus. But surely the possibility of the 
formation of such general concepts involves the 
element of rationality in the sphere in which they 
obtain. 

In my first lecture I indicated that the deepest 
conviction of my philosophical creed is that the 
ultimate reality is a harmony of rationality, goodness, 
and beauty, which are manifested to the human mind 
in particular instances of themselves in this world of 
time and space which has therefore what may be 
called a sacramental mode of reality.1 What is 
specifically human is the recognition of these universals 
in particular instances, and in each exercise of such 
activity the man is a compound of reason, will, and 
feeling. Ideally the man would be a perfect unity, 
in which each element would be rightly functioning 
and rightly interpermeated by the others. But noone 
of us is a perfect man, neither is this world a perfect 
world. The result is that in actual experience our 

1 Above, p. 5. 


22 THE. “PLACE ‘OF’ REASON 


activity is often discordant rather than harmonious, 
ourselves distracted rather than unified, whilst we 
have to deal with imperfect and fragmentary mani- 
festations of rationality, goodness, and beauty in 
which these elements are imperfectly harmonised 
and interpermeated one with another. In the light 
of the considerations [ have been putting before you 
let us now turn our attention directly to that element 
in our consciousness which we call emotional. 

The more one tries to think out what is meant by 
such words as emotion, or feeling, the more difficult 
does the task become, and one is led to appreciate 
the remark of an eminent Oxford Philosopher that 
the word is used as a sort of receptacle to which may be 
consigned all elements in consciousness not otherwise 
accounted for. The chief difficulty is to find the 
common principle according to which the name feeling 
or emotion is bestowed. What, for example, is there 
in common between the use of the word to describe 
sense-perception and the use of it to describe such 
emotions as love and hate, fear and confidence? 
What is there in common between feeling the cold 
hardness of a stone, and feeling compassion at the 
sight of a suffering animal? Another very difficult 
question is that of the relation of feeling to cognition. 
Are feelings the children or the parents of cognitions ? 
Sometimes they seem to be one, sometimes the other. 
For example, a man may receive a telegram telling 
him that he has failed in an examination, and may 
be rendered miserable by the news. On another 
occasion he may first just feel misery without knowing 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 23 


why, failing to recognise the symptoms of a disordered 
liver. I cannot but think, I may remark in passing, 
that those psychologists who explain all theological 
doctrines as the rationalisation of emotions whose 
true cause is something very different, seem to me as 
a rule to lay too much stress on the latter type of 
experience and too little on the former, and to overlook 
this difficulty of the relation of feeling to cognition, 
in which sometimes the one and sometimes the other 
is the prior element in our experience. 

The investigation of such problems as these is a 
task for which we have no time in these lectures, and, 
having noticed them, we must let them be. The point 
to which I wish to draw your attention is this. If 
man be a spiritual unity of reason, will, and feeling, 
then there 1s such interpermeation of these elements 
in his being that we cannot isolate each by itself 
and assert that where the one is there the others are 
not. If man be a rational being at all, then his 
feelings must be as feelings different from what they 
would be if he were not. They are the feelings of a 
rational being. When in any particular case they 
are not, that is not because they are more perfect 
as feelings, but because he is less perfectly rational; 
and that, as we have seen, is no uncommon fact 
among creatures so imperfect in every way as our- 
selves. Similarly a hard-headed rationalist may be 
deficient in feeling, but that does not in itself make 
his rationality any the better. 

If this be so, then feelings themselves may be 
rational and irrational, and good and bad. We 


24 THE PLACE OF REASON 


cannot say that because a feeling is a feeling it is 
therefore futile to apply to it rational or moral 
predicates, to criticise or Justify it on rational or 
moral grounds; and if we find within ourselves, as 
unfortunately we often do, feelings which are un- 
justifiable on either or both of those grounds, then 
by the grace of God we must seek to transform them 
or to eradicate them from our lives, asking, in the 
traditional language of the Church, for a heart of 
flesh in place of a heart of stone. 

It may be objected that it is an inevitable result 
of our being finite that each man, in order to make any 
progress, has to concentrate on one particular line 
of activity, remembering that as we are members one 
of another, no man can be the whole body. The 
classical illustration of this would be, I suppose, 
Darwin’s regret that his devotion to scientific research 
had diminished his sensibility to music. There is of 
course truth in this—though the many-sidedness of 
really great men should remind us that it may be 
exaggerated ; but the recognition of our limitations 
as finite beings must not blind us to the fact that they 
are limitations, and as such witness to regrettably 
necessary deficiencies in actual existence and not to 
an intrinsic incompatibility between reason, will and 
feeling. The man of thought, the man of action, and 
the artist should each recognise his own deficiencies, 
regret them, strive to remedy them so far as he can 
without deserting his own vocation, and welcome the 
contribution of the others to the life of the community. 

1 Life, Vol. I, pp. 100-2. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 25 


We have been thinking of rationality, goodness 
and beauty as the three elements in the ultimate 
reality which is manifested to us in this world of 
time and space. Now what Dr. Otto’s book, The 
Idea of the Holy, seems to me to suggest 1s that we 
must add to these a fourth specific element, the 
numinous. According to his exposition this element, 
is first present to our consciousness through feeling, 
like the misery which is consequent upon a disordered 
liver. I have not time to discuss the question whether 
we can take the existence of this element as established, 
and I must confess that I have not yet been able to 
make up my mind upon that point. Whether holiness 
is specifically different from goodness is a question 
as difficult as whether sublimity is specifically different 
from beauty. We must remember that this element, 
if it exists, is an element in the rational coherence of 
the universe which is the object of our thought. 

Bearing that in mind, we will confine ourselves 
to those undoubted facts of experience which Dr. 
Otto has brought out into the light of day, those 
fused emotions of wonder, awe, and fascination. 
What I am concerned to maintain, as a result of our 
discussion, is that, granting the existence of this 
emotional complex, we may and must submit it to 
rational and moral criticism, and that in two ways. 

First, we must ask whether that before which we 
believe ourselves to be bowing in mingled wonder, 
awe, and fascination is worthy of our homage on 
grounds of rationality, goodness, or beauty. The 
remembrance of that Platonic discussion of courage, 


Cc 


26 THE PLACE OF REASON 


which we mentioned earlier, is surely enough to 
convince us that mere numinousness, the mere power 
to produce in us these emotions, is no sufficient ground 
for our consenting to them. Feelings, we have seen, 
can be rational or irrational, morally good or morally 
bad. It is possible to rest content with wondering 
in cases where we can and ought to be investigating, 
it is possible to fear what ought not to be feared, it is 
possible to be fascinated by quite unworthy objects ; 
there are cases in which it is our positive duty to 
dispel our mystery, to conquer our fear, to master 
our desires. How are we to set about this purging 
of our emotions? Surely it can only be done by 
rational enquiry as to the worthiness of their objects. 
There is all the difference in the world between a 
state of fear caused by walking under a ladder or 
spilling the salt, and a state of fear caused by im- 
penitence after committing some sin which really 
is a sin. The latter is fear in the presence of a God 
Who is worthy of fear on moral grounds, the former 
is fear in the supposed presence of a god who has no 
such claims to respect. The one is rational, the other 
isnot. In this way, and in this way only, it seems to 
me, would it be possible to find a criterion to dis- 
tinguish between what Dr. Otto would call those 
stimuli of the numinous emotion which are truly 
manifestations of the divine and those which are 
not, a criterion which his treatment of the subject 
seems, as I said in the last lecture, to require but not 
to provide.? . 
1 Above, p. 20. 2 Above, pp. 6, 10. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 27 


It may be objected that whereas a few minutes ago 
I stated my intention of leaving the existence of the 
numinous as a specific element of reality an open 
question, I have now put forward an argument based 
on the denial of such existence, seeing that the claim 
to criticise numinous emotion on rational and moral 
grounds is a claim that could not justifiably be made 
in questions of art. There is some force in this 
objection, though not so much as perhaps appears 
at first sight. Our discussion of what is demanded by 
the rational coherence of the universe as a_pre- 
supposition of thought led us to see that the granting 
of autonomy to beauty and numinousness in their 
own spheres would have to be balanced by a refusal 
to grant them leave ultimately to contradict one 
another or rationality or goodness. But however 
much I might urge those considerations, the upholder 
of the numinous as a specific element might in the 
last resort reply that whether good or bad, rational 
or irrational, at any rate the numinous element just 
is there, the universe has within it that which is 
capable of producing these emotions in us, and we 
must recognise the fact. To this | might reply that 
such an argument, so far from setting forward the 
cause of religion, or being a help to the Christian 
apologist, would provide an additional difficulty in 
the way of believing in God, seeing that it would 
imply an element in the ultimate reality of which 
neither rationality, goodness, nor beauty could be 
predicated. This would mean surely the suicide both 
of religion‘and of thought. There is only one way in 


28. THE PLACE OF REASON 


which such a conclusion could be avoided. It would 
be necessary first to demonstrate clearly that the 
numinous does as a matter of fact exist as a specific 
element, and secondly that it 1s such that by its own 
intrinsic value it merits our devotion equally with 
rationality, goodness, and beauty. Now to say that 
it really exists and that it deserves our devotion are 
statements which are patient of rational criticism. 
Their claim to objective validity brings them within 
the sphere in which reason is operative, and the 
necessity of deciding whether such an element exists 
and is intrinsically valuable is the second of the two | 
ways in which it seems to me that that emotional 
complex in human consciousness which has been 
called numinous must submit to rational criticism. 

Let us now try to’sum up, so far as they are relevant 
to our subject, the place of reason in Christian 
apologetics, the conclusions which may be drawn 
from our discussion. These may be tabulated as 
follows. 

First, the“ questions with which the apologist is 
primarily concerned are those of the truth and 
rationality of belief and practice. 

Secondly, feelings and actions can be rightly spoken 
of as rational or irrational and justified or criticised 
on those grounds. 

Thirdly, the presupposition of thought being the 
rational coherence of the universe the apologist, 
though he may recognise that it has other char- 
acteristics besides rationality, cannot acquiesce in 
calling these irrational or non-rational. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 29 


Fourthly, to be indefinable or to be cognised in 
immediate acts of awareness are not necessarily 
marks of irrationality or non-rationality. 

Fifthly, it is the work of the apologist to follow in 
the steps of belief and practice, to reflect upon them, 
and to ask how far the beliefs are true and the practices 
rational. 

Sixthly, the primary and ultimate function of 
reason is the immediate apprehension of truth and 
rationality, and the triumphant conclusion of the 
apologist’s task would be the exposition of the faith 
and practice of the Christian Church in such a way as 
to provoke the response, ‘ Yes, that is true and 
rational.’ This triumphant conclusion cannot, of 
course, be reached until we pass from seeing in a glass 
darkly to knowing even as we are known; but it is 
the goal of the apologist’s aim towards which he must 
strive to make what progress is possible to him in 
this life. 

We ended our last lecture by distinguishing between 
the work of the converting preacher and that of the 
apologist. We have now gone a step further and 
distinguished apologetics from the faith and practice 
of the converted, and I would ask your attention to 
the relation between the two. The apologist must 
confine himself strictly to questions of truth and 
rationality, but if he is to perform his task satis- 
factorily it is essential that he should be as fully 
acquainted as possible with the beliefs and practices 
whose truth and rationality are in question. Is this 
possible to one who does not share them? I very 


30 THE PLACE OF REASON 


much doubt it, but hesitate categorically to deny that 
sympathetic understanding can give sufficient insight 
for the satisfactory prosecution of the enquiry. But 
I do not hesitate to assert that, in so far as sharing in 
beliefs and practices and the emotions associated 
with them increases a man’s knowledge of the subject 
with which he has to deal, it renders him more com- 
petent to pursue the enquiry into their truth and 
rationality, provided that at the same time his 
devotion to truth is such that he is able by strict 
self-discipline of the mind to follow the argument 
whither it leads. Such a man would be the ideal 
apologist, and such men are needed by the Church in 
this and every age. Not such men alone, for it takes 
many differing members to form the body. The 
converting preacher, the large-hearted pastor, the 
faithful servant of Christ whose mind is untroubled 
by questionings, and many another, are equally 
valuable. But if it is the specific claim of Christian 
faith and practice to be true and rational, there must 
always be room within the Church for men whose 
task is to follow whither their reason leads them with 
unquestioned loyalty. That this is the specific 
claim of Christian faith and practice will be the thesis 
of our next lecture. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 31 


Mote 


UR last lecture was devoted to an attempt 
) to establish the position that the primary 
concern of the apologist is with the rationality 

of religion. That argument can be briefly summarised 
as follows. The presupposition of all thought is 
the rationality of the universe. To believe in God is 
to believe that the universe is such that personality 
and goodness can be predicated of it. By God we 
do not mean some specific element in the universe 
isolated and called ‘ divine,’ but the universe as a 
whole, the ultimate reality. We do not wish to 
deny that there are other elements in the universe 
besides that of rationality, or other elements in 
religion besides the apprehension of rationality. 
Least of all do we wish to deny the importance in 
religion of that personal intercourse between the soul 
and God which is an experience of the whole man in 
which reason, will, and feeling are found, an experience 
far fuller, richer and deeper than any mere isolated 
act of intellectual apprehension of rationality. But 
we do wish to maintain that that experience is only 
justified if the object of that communion be the 
ultimate reality itself, that reality which in all its 
richness is in every element interpermeated by 
rationality. In other words, our religious beliefs 
must be assumed to have something to say about the 
universe, and it must be the task of the apologist to 


a2 THE PLACE OF REASON 


consider whether what they say about it is true. The 
specific temptation of the apologist is the temptation 
to forsake this task, to seek to avoid the long and 
arduous quest for truth by following some short 
cut which seems to lead more easily to the commenda- 
tion of his religion to his fellow men. In this lecture 
I hope to show that historically Christianity always 
has claimed to have something to say about the 
universe, and that therefore the Christian apologist 
can never be excused from the duty of considering 
whether what it says is true. He must continually 
remember that in the words of Harnack, ‘if piety 
should! suffer in})the( process) iti mithere) ig) va 
stronger interest than that of piety—namely, that 
of truth.’ 

The Christian religion was the offspring of Judaism, 
and we need go no further than the first verse of the 
Book of Genesis for evidence that Judaism claimed 
to have something to say about the universe. ‘In the 
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ 
What the Jews had to say about the universe was 
said in what we may calla dramatic form. For them 
this earth was the scene on which was being enacted, 
so to speak, the divine drama. God was the creator 
and ruler of all that is, including this earth and all 
upon it. Among this creation was mankind, and 
among mankind were the Jews, chosen by Him to 
be His own people, whose duty it was to serve and 
please Him in return for His choice. As He was holy, 
so they too must be holy, with a holiness which by 
the time of Christ was seen to involve moral righteous- 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 33 


ness. For the time being God’s people might suffer 
and be despised by the nations of the world, but in 
due time God would vindicate His people and establish 
the Kingdom of God either on this earth or in Heaven 
after the end of the world, sending His Messiah for 
the purpose of this vindication. 

We should notice that whatever difference there 
may be in content of belief, in form this Jewish faith 
was precisely similar to that faith in which the 
Christian boy or girl is brought up. In other words, 
this dramatic representation of the universe is the 
natural mode of expression of religion. The Christian 
child learns from his parents and teachers to believe 
in God as His creator and ruler, whose predominant 
characteristics are righteousness and love, whom he 
is called to serve with responsive righteousness and 
love. He also learns of the atonement wrought by 
Christ, of the unseen presence with him of his risen 
Saviour, and of the power of the Holy Spirit. This, 
and much more, he learns which the Jew did not; 
but it is all in form a further elaboration of the 
characters and incidents in that divine drama which 
for the Jew as for him is the explanation of the 
universe. 

But the religious outlook which issues in this’ 
dramatic presentation of the universe is not the only 
way of approaching it which is open to the mind of 
man. That presentation, no matter how simple and 
natural it may seem to the religious mind, is neverthe- 
less the complex product of a manner of life in which 
a certain interpretation of the facts of existence is 


34" THE PLACE OF REASON 


an integral element in the experiencing of them.t 
Now the scientific approach to the universe, as also 
the philosophical, starts as it were from the other end. 
They start by attempting to criticise, so far as is 
possible, the element of interpretation, and their aim 
is simply in the one case to discover and use, in the 
other to discover and understand, the truth about 
the universe as it is objectively presented to the mind 
of man. The presuppositions, axioms, and postulates 
to be used in these voyages of discovery are to be as 
few as possible. Without some few, such as the 
uniformity of nature, and the necessary laws of 
thought, the vessel cannot put to sea at all. But 
the book of nature is the Bible of the man of science, 
and his prophets are ‘ fundamentalists,’ for the only 
justifiable interpretation of any one passage is that 
provided by another passage in the same book. 
The philosopher goes deeper, for he seeks to under- 
stand as a whole that universe whose detailed descrip- 
tion is the scientists’ task. Religion starts with 
God, and interprets the experience of life on the basis 
of belief in Him ; philosophy starts with the experience 
of life, and faith in God, if reached at all, is the crowning 
achievement of the quest. And throughout the canon 
of rationality is the compass which guides the scientist 
and the philosopher on their journeys. 

The contrast between the religious attitude on the 
one hand, and the scientific and the philosophical 

‘I have attempted to state this point more in detail in a paper on 
Experience, Religious Experience, and Christian Experience, pub- 


lished in The Interpreter, Vol. XIX., No. 4, and reprinted below, 
pp. 67 ff. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 35. 


on the other, is brought home to the Christian child 
by his wider education and experience of life. He has 
been brought up to think of God as his Maker and 
his loving Father, who cares above all for goodness, 
and desires the loving response of good children, who 
has sent His only-begotten Son to bring forgiveness 
and freedom from sin to His people, and strengthens 
them by the gift of His Spirit. He has learned to 
regard himself as a member of God’s Church, united 
to God through prayer and sacrament, and called to 
inherit a blessed immortality in the Kingdom of 
Heaven. But now he is presented with a world which 
at first sight has little in common with the world as 
he has pictured it. Human endeavour in an en- 
vironment of natural law is the appearance which it 
now begins to wear, and whether he looks outward 
to the starry heavens or inwards to the depths of 
his own being, he learns to observe ‘ facts as they are,’ 
and to trace within and without the operations of 
those ‘laws of nature’ which the sciences discover. 
So far from finding clear signs of the finger of a 
loving Father, he is impressed by the obvious in- 
difference to moral values and human aspirations of 
those forces whose discovery leads to the formulation 
of scientific ‘laws.’ He is driven to reflect upon his 
religion, and to ask whether, in the light of his new 
knowledge of ‘ things as they are,’ he can continue 
to believe in his religious creed as giving a true 
account of the Universe. He is driven, that is, to 
those questions whose study is the work of the 
Christian apologist. 


36 THE PLACE OF REASON 
The Christian Church in the days of its youth 


underwent an experience very similar to that of the 
Christian child to-day. We have seen that it was 
born of Judaism, and inherited that religious outlook 
which issues in a dramatic presentation of the universe. 
But without, in the Greek world, men had been 
approaching the universe as scientists and philosophers, 
not explaining the world by reference to Jehovah, 
its Maker and Ruler, but pondering such problems as 
those of the one and the many, and of being and 
becoming, and asking the nature of that which is 
ultimately real. 

In the first century of our era the predominant 
philosophy was a scepticism which really implied a 
despair of success in the quest of truth. In our 
earlier lectures we have spoken of this world of time 
and space as having a sacramental reality, in which 
the eternal goodness, beauty and rationality are 
manifested in particular instances of themselves. The 
paradox of the relation of the universal to the par- 
ticular is that although the universal is manifested 
in and through the particular instance of it, yet 
itself it transcends and cannot have ascribed to it 
all the predicates of the instance; as triangularity 
is neither isosceles, scalene, nor equilateral, so also 
beauty itself is neither extended on canvas nor audible 
through the scraping of bow on string. Now Greek 
thought had laid so much stress on this unlikeness 
of the universal to the particular that it had come to 
view its unlikeness to anything of which we have any 
experience as being the primary characteristic of the 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 37 


utlimate reality. All that could be said of it was that 
it was not like any object of our apprehension in this 
world of time and space. Thus came the conception 
of the unknowable God, and there were not wanting 
those who carried this process to its logical conclusion 
and spoke of the ultimate reality as the ov dy beds 
—the non-existent God. Reason being thus despaired 
of, the religious looked for light from revelation, and 
the Roman Empire was flooded with a host of oriental 
applicants for the vacant post of revealer of the truth. 
Myths and legends of unfathomable antiquity, claim- 
ing to be divine revelations of that which was beyond 
the grasp of human reason, provided the religious 
needs of man with objects of worship more satisfying 
than the unknowable God. An excellent example of 
this conception of the relation between reason and 
revelation is to be found in Philo of Alexandria. In 
him flowed together the Greek and the Hebrew 
streams of thought, but in such a way that for him 
the Hebrew scriptures provided the revelation made 
necessary by the Greek conception of the limitations 
of reason. He is the direct parent of all who base 
their faith on the authority of an infallible Bible 
which is above rational criticism; he is the indirect 
parent of those whose oracle is an infallible Church. 
The dogmatic edifices of them all are founded upon 
the quagmire of the one really bottomless scepticism, 
that scepticism which denies the competence of 
human reason to distinguish truth and falsehood and 
thus to criticise that which is offered to it under the 
form of revelation. 


38 THE PLACE OF REASON 


Into this world of scepticism with its unknowable 
God came the Christian faith with its message that 
God was knowable and revealed in Jesus Christ. 
The figure of St. Paul standing at Athens upon the 
hill of Ares among the worshippers of the ayvwaros 
Oeds, and declaring ‘What . . . ye worship in 
ignorance, this set I forth unto you,’! typifies the 
position of Christianity in the world of the first 
century.’ ‘There ' ‘were! inot) (wanting, /of course; 
Christians who shared the scepticism of their con- 
temporaries, for whom the Old Testament scriptures 
enriched by the addition of the story of our Lord 
formed a revelation to be set in contrast to the witness 
of human reason. There were then, there always 
have been, and there are to-day such Christians. But 
they are like those early Christians who expected an 
immediate and catastrophic parousta of Christ after 
the manner pictured in Jewish apocalypses; they 
represent, that is to say, one of those relics of pre- 
Christian thought which, being inconsistent with the 
true genius of Christianity, are gradually expelled from 
the Body of Christ under the leading of the Holy 
Spirit through the ages. 

This question was settled in principle in the second 
and third centuries of our era by the issue of the 
conflict between the Catholic Church and the Gnostic 
sects. That conflict has many aspects, but we shall 
be blind to one of the most important if we fail to 
see in it the vindication of the rationalism of orthodox 
Christianity. In all its hydra-headed manifestations 


1 Acts xviii. 23. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 39 


the basis of Gnosticism was that despair of reason 
which led men to abandon the genuine quest of 
knowledge and to substitute the credulous acceptance 
of myth and legend. Entirely in consonance with 
this depreciation of human reason was their ethical 
creed, based on an identification of the distinction 
between good and evil with that between spirit and 
matter. In the two spheres of thought and action 
they denied the sacramental quality of this world in 
space and time, denying that truth and goodness are 
to be recognised and pursued by man in and through 
his life in the flesh. They viewed a man as a fragment 
of some spiritual essence imprisoned in an alien 
material body ; his only hope lay in his receiving the 
revelation which should act like a charm and set 
him free from his prison. 

It was of course open to the orthodox Church to 
attempt to compete with the Gnostic sects by adopting 
the same sceptical premisses and claiming to be the 
bearers of a rival and superior revelation. There 
were, as we have said before, some good orthodox 
Catholics who did this. But when one surveys 
the writings of the apologists, the moral demands 
made of the Christian, and perhaps above all the 
unequivocal refusal to allow the historicity of the 
Gospel story to be subordinated to an allegorical 
significance, it is impossible not to see in the main 
stream of the Christian teaching a claim to have 
something to say about the universe, to have some- 
thing to say about that same universe which is 
studied by the sciences and philosophy, to have 


40 THE PLACE OF REASON 


something to say which can stand trial at the bar 
of reason in the presence of philosopher and man of 
science. | 

In making this claim the Church was being true 
to its Founder. It is to be hoped that the times are 
passing in which eschatologists strove for the person 
of the historic Jesus with those who saw in Him pre- 
eminently the greatest moral teacher of all time. 
Surely they combine to shew us that the Gospels 
record the story of One who claimed to be Messiah 
come to set up the Kingdom of God, but who claimed 
it as representing a God whose nature was righteous 
love manifested in service. Not by clash of arms or 
miraculous appearance in the sky would He terrify 
men into submission. He appealed to those who had 
‘the single eye,’ and was openly surprised that men 
who could profess to foretell the weather were unable 
to read the signs of the times.1. Adapting the words 
of St. Paul we may say that He went about by the 
manifestation of the truth commending Himself to 
every man’s conscience in the sight of God.? 

He claimed to be the Messiah who had come to 
establish the Kingdom of God. For the time being 
He was to fulfil the role of the suffering servant spoken 
of by the prophet Isaiah ; as such He was to die for 
the sins of mankind, and only through death to pass 
to the glory of the Son of Man in the clouds of Heaven. 
Was He a deluded fanatic who had got it into His 
head that He was Messiah when there is no such 
thing, or was the truth about Him that He was really 


1 Mt, vi. 22=Lk. xi. 34; Lk. xii. 56 (? Mt. xvi. 3). 
BC VLA ACORGHLM cl org 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 41 


Messiah and knew it? The Christian Church took 
Him at His word, and built its dogmatic edifice upon 
the foundation of that faith in Him. If He was truly 
Messiah, then the universe must be such that there 
is a place for a Messiah in its ordered wholeness. 
Christ had claimed Messiahship not as the bearer of 
some mysterious revelation, but as One whose life 
and teaching challenged recognition by human reason 
as manifestations of goodness, truth and beauty. 
So the Church, in proclaiming to the world its accep- 
tance of His claim to Messiahship, challenged the 
verdict on the truth of its message at the bar of 
reason. It set itself to the task of thinking out what 
the acceptance of His claim would involve, and passed 
to the full realisation that it involves belief in Him 
as very God of one substance with the Father, made 
man, one Person in two natures. The whole fabric 
of the Christian creed was a rational construction, 
an attempt to say something about the universe 
without ignoring the problem. presented by the 
appearance of Jesus Christ upon the pages of this 
world’s history. 

There was need of such a process of thought in 
primitive Christianity. Without realising the intel- 
lectual difficulties inherent in their religion, Christians 
believed their Lord to be both divine and human, and 
combined a monotheistic horror of idolatry with the 
worship of Christ as God. Here, clearly, were beliefs 
and practices which prima facie were self-contradictory 
and absurd. But the Church was not content to rest 
its claim to allegiance on its power to produce in 


D 


42 THE PLACE OF REASON 


men subjective effects in religious experience, glorying 
in the non-rationality of its doctrines. It realised 
that only by reflection on such metaphysical questions 
as the nature of unity and the meaning of godhead 
and manhood could a religion which involved a 
trinitarian conception of God and a divine incarnation 
continue to merit and to receive the assent of thinking 
men. So this task was undertaken, and the Christian 
religion came to be expounded in the terms of rational 
philosophy. 

I have spoken of the claim to be true and rational 
as being the specific claim of the Christian religion. 
What is meant is this. So long as one ignores that 
claim, and concentrates attention on the pragmatic 
question of the subjective religious experiences of 
Christians, | do not see how any valid ground can be 
discovered for distinguishing the Christian experience 
from the religious experiences of the adherents of 
other faiths. Assurance of freedom from sin, of 
immortality, of communion with God, is no peculiar 
possession of the Christian, and those who try to 
prove the superiority of Christianity to the mystery 
religions of the Roman Empire in the early centuries 
of our era by claiming for it merely a greater potency 
to produce such effects are building upon an insecure 
foundation. The only way in which the Christian 
apologist can distinguish the worshippers of Christ 
from the worshippers of the redeemer gods of the 
mystery religions is by exhibiting the objective 
difference between Him and His rivals. It is not 
because the Christian has subjectively a deeper ex- 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 43 


perience of these things, but because Christ is in 
very truth God incarnate that Christianity has a 
claim upon our allegiance. To face this claim, to 
consider its rational justification is the task of the 
Christian apologist. It is not an easy task, but it is 
a task which the Christian Church cannot ignore. 
That the Church has not ignored it in the past the 
rejection of Gnosticism, the formulation of the Creeds, 
and the long list of the names of Christian philosophers 
bear witness. That the Christian Church honours 
among its saints Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas— 
to mention no more—is evidence enough that it 
claims to have something to say about the universe, 
something which it claims to be justifiable as true at 
the bar of reason. 

As the years pass and progress is made in scientific 
and philosophical investigation, so the task of the 
Christian apologist is ever with us. Here there 
appears another difference between orthodox Chris- 
tianity and the Gnostic sects. Those sects claimed 
to have a special revelation about matters of science 
and history, which must be accepted uncriticised as 
the truth which sets men free. The Philonic treat- 
ment of the Bible as such a revelation has, where 
admitted in the Church, caused trouble enough within 
living memory, as those who can remember the 
conflicts over what we may call Darwinianism can 
testify. We may be thankful for the contribution 
those conflicts have made to the casting out of that 
false conception of biblical authority, and in the 
issue of those conflicts we see again the Church facing 


44 THE PLACE OF REASON 


its task of testing the truth of its doctrines at the bar 
of reason. It was not by denying the competence 
of the sciences to discover the truth about the history 
of life on this earth, it was not by a scornful disregard 
of those discoveries based on a dualism which denies 
their importance for our conception of God, that 
progress was made. Our gratitude is due to those of 
our immediate ancestors who trod the dark and 
difficult ways of honest rational apologetic, in order 
that amidst the removing of those things that were 
shaken those which were not shaken might endure. 
It would of course be absurd to over emphasise 
the importance of rational apologetic so as to 
depreciate unduly the value of other elements in 
religion. A man’s religion should involve his whole 
life, and, as we have seen, he can act and feel as well 
as think, and there are other elements in reality 
besides pure rationality. The appeal to man’s 
emotional nature of what has been called ‘the 
numinous ’ is a thing neither to be denied nor deplored. 
All that is to be contested is the claim that that appeal 
lifts religion beyond rational criticism and justifica- - 
tion. Such a claim was made by the reviewer of 
Dr. Gore’s work to whom we referred at the beginning 
of our first lecture. A critical study of Dr. Otto’s 
book, on which that claim was based, and a brief 
survey of the development of Christian thought have 
led us to see that such a claim cannot be allowed. 
It represents a standing temptation to the Christian 
apologist. From the days of the Gnostics and the 
Montanists to the present day there has never been 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 45 


absent that temptation to avoid facing the crucial 
question: Is Christianity true? In the modern 
world perhaps the most famous attempt to establish 
Christianity while leaving that question unfaced is 
to be found in the work of Albrecht Ritschl. I do 
not wish in the least to minimise the value of the 
contributions made by him and by Dr. Otto to our 
appreciation of the richness and worth of the Christian 
religion; but I do wish most earnestly to contend 
that the question ‘Is Christianity rational?’ is so 
fundamental a question that it must be faced honestly 
by the Christian apologist without any attempt 
whatever to shift the basis of argument on to grounds 
other than rational. Indeed, to refer once again to 
the work of Dr. Gore, whose criticism gave rise to 
the argument of our first lecture, it is not because 
Dr. Gore attempts by rational argument to establish 
the truth of Christianity that his work is open to 
criticism; it is rather because he is not sufficiently 
thoroughgoing in his rationalism. In all his works 
he seems to assume a contrast between reason and 
revelation which is, when thought out, untenable. 
If human reason be, fundamentally, man’s power of 
recognising truth and rationality presented to the 
_ mind, and if rationality be an element in that ultimate 
reality which for the theist is God, then in all appre- 
hension of truth we have the interaction of revelation 
and reason, God revealing Himself and man appre- 
hending the revelation. To postulate a sphere in 
which human reason can apprehend truth apart from 
God’s self-revealing activity is to introduce a dualism 


46 THE PLACE OF REASON 


which contradicts the monotheism of reasonable 
Christian faith, and demands on the human side a 
view of reason which is comparable in the intellectual 
sphere to Pelagianism in the moral. Reason and 
revelation are correlative terms, denoting not con- 
trasted methods of arriving at truth, but two com- 
plementary elements in all attainment of knowledge. 

To hold that God who reveals Himself in manifold 
ways wherever truth is discovered has also revealed 
Himself more directly, so to speak, to the Jewish 
prophets and in Jesus Christ is not to hold that where 
this was done reason was superseded by some other 
human activity. Revelation is given, of course, to 
the whole man, and includes the apprehension of far 
more than pure truth or mere rationality. A right 
attitude of heart and will was necessary for prophet 
and apostle to be able to apprehend God’s message. 
But in so far as the prophet Amos, for example, 
rightly recognised the truth that if there be a God He 
must be righteous, or the Apostle Peter recognised 
the Messiah in Christ, they were rationally appre- 
hending the revelation of God. Such immediate 
graspings of revelation must indeed be distinguished 
from later reflection upon them; but this is not a 
distinction between a non-rational intuition and a 
rational process of proof, for we saw in our first 
lecture that all such processes are ultimately analysable 
into just such immediate acts of apprehension as 


those of Amos and St. Peter.? 

1 For a fuller discussion of this point, see C. C. J. Webb, Problems 
in the Relation of God and Man. (London, Nisbet, 1911.) 

* Above, pp. 2-5. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC - —= 47 


In the subsequent processes of reflection we test 
the rationality of our discoveries by viewing them in 
the light of all we know of the universe from other 
sources. To discuss this problem fully would require 
a discussion of the problem of error, for which there 
is no time here. But this much may be said, and it 
is sufficient for our purpose. Those immediate acts 
of apprehension in which a man seems to make a 
new discovery may, of course, turn out to be genuine 
_ discoveries of truth, or mistakes. In the first case 
they are genuine acts of reason rightly functioning ; 
in the second, either the supposed discoverer was 
imperfectly rational in his thinking, or the mistake 
was due to some obscurity in the subject matter as 
presented to his mind. The object of the subsequent 
reflection is to discover whether in either or both of 
these ways the alleged discovery was vitiated by 
error. But when such reflection confirms the truth 
of the discovery and proclaims that here was a genuine 
revelation of God, it does not make rational what had 
hitherto been a non-rational intuition; it merely 
confirms the rationality of what had been in fact 
a rational apprehension of God’s revelation all the 
time. 

To the test of such reflection all alleged discoveries 
or revelations must come. If we grant this, we 
are enabled to enunciate an extremely important 
principle, that the guarantee of any alleged discovery 
or revelation must lie in its inherent reasonableness, 
and in nothing else whatsoever. A doctrine cannot 
be guaranteed, for example, by its source. Whether 


48 THE PLACE OF REASON 


it be proclaimed as coming from an infallible book, or 
an infallible church, or as a message from a departed 
spirit, or as revealed through gazing in a crystal, 
what we must scrutinise is not the source it is alleged 
to come from, but the doctrine itself. It is neglect 
of this principle which so often reduces those who 
depend on an infallible book or church to dire straits 
when confronted with startling revelations which are 
said to have been communicated by the spirits of the 
departed or directly in a vision by Christ Himself. 
Nor, again, can the practical appeal of a cultus be an 
adequate substitute for the truth of the doctrines it | 
implies. Both the liturgical and the extra-liturgical 
cultus of the Blessed Sacrament, for example, must 
face the question of their philosophical justification, 
and if either be found wanting at the bar of reason, it 
cannot be encouraged by a Church which cares for 
truth, or knowingly persisted in by an individual 
against his reason without damage to his own 
soul. 

There is one practical difficulty which follows from 
our argument to which I should like to call attention 
before concluding this lecture. If what has been said 
be true, then the Church has two duties to perform 
which seem to be incompatible with one another. 
It must somehow or other combine the proclamation 
of a message with the search for truth. The Church is 
nothing if it be not God’s agent on earth proclaiming 
to sinful man God’s message of forgiveness through 
Christ and life in the Spirit. But how can it proclaim 
this message with a trumpet-like voice of no uncertain 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 49 


meaning, and yet at the same time be facing and 
considering the question whether that message be 
true when tested at the bar of reason in the light of 
all the growing knowledge of the universe revealed 
to science and philosophy ? This difficulty has beset 
the Church through all the ages, and we are struggling 
with it to-day ; nor do | think that any fully satis- 
factory solution of it is at present open tous. Itisa 
difficulty not peculiar to the Church or to religion ; 
but a difficulty inherent in the nature of things as 
they are. It is a condition of existence in this ever- 
changing finite world of space and time, whose relation 
to the eternal infinite is so baffling a mystery to 
philosophy. But our very finiteness may have its 
compensations, and enable us, while practically our 
difficulty solvitur ambulando, to wait in patience for 
that logical and theoretical solution which will only 
come when we know even as we are known. Through 
this finiteness it comes that there are men and women 
of different gifts, yet members one of another. To 
some is given the unquestioning faith and zeal in 
proclaiming the message of God, to others the ceaseless 
questioning and that faith which, in the words of the 
poet, finds expression ‘in honest doubt’; and the 
Church is the mother of us all. Here on this earth 
she must walk by faith and not by sight, and so long 
as this is so, there is one way and one way only in 
which she can bear witness to the utter sincerity of. 
conviction with which she believes her message to 
be true. Just because she believes it to be true, and 
for no other reason, she must make the venture of 


50 THE PLACE OF REASON 


faith and challenge its testing at the bar of reason. 
She must even nurture at her bosom and own as her 
sons those who are prepared to be its critics. Then, 
and only then, confident in the honesty of her faith, 
she can trumpet to the world ‘ This is the way, 
walk ye in it.’ 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 51 


IV 


UR first three lectures have been devoted to 
vindicating the claims of reason, to showing 
that it has a part to play in Christian 

apologetic which is of fundamental importance and 
which cannot be played by anything else. Our 
attention has been concentrated on the powers of 
reason; we have thought little of its limitations. 
They are important, and now demand consideration. 

We have thought of human reason as the faculty 
in man of recognising truth or rationality presented 
to the mind, and that the pre-supposition of all 
thought is the rationality of the universe. So far as 
I can see, the limitations of human reason are two, 
and both arise from our existence as finite beings at 
particular times in the history of this world. The first 
limitation is due to the fact that we are not sufficiently 
rational. Historically the power of rational thought 
is a comparatively late acquisition of the human 
mind; and the practice of reflection in which we 
criticise the rationality of our acts of apprehension is 
later in origin than the making of those acts. This is 
true of the individual as of the race. There is always 
a danger of our thought being insufficiently rational. 
The remedy for this is, of course, education. 

The second limitation arises from the complexity of 
the subject matter with which our reason has to deal. 
Although, as we have seen, we must assume the 
rationality of the universe if we are to think at all, 


52 THE PLACE OF REASON 


yet so far beyond the understanding of any of us is 
the rich complexity of reality that we have to admit, 
time and time again, that it passes beyond our com- 
prehension. Here again the remedy is education. 
Just as a complicated problem in naval engineering 
may be beyond the comprehension of a beginner in 
mathematics, so the problem of the universe puzzles 
and baffles us all. But just as it is possible for that 
beginner step by step to acquire the knowledge 
necessary to enable him to deal with his problems, 
so we look forward to the time when we shall know 
even as we are known. | 

Then, and then only, will theology reach its goal. 
Meanwhile we have to walk by faith and not by sight, 
taking care to avoid two mistakes. The one is to call 
faith knowledge, to say ‘we see’ when we do not; 
the other to seek a short cut to ease our tension, 
substituting something else for that rational enquiry 
and education which alone can bring us nearer the 
knowledge that we seek. 

This distinction between faith and knowledge is so 
vital to religion that a few words must be said about 
it. The word ‘ knowledge’ should strictly be kept 
for the perfect rational apprehension of the object 
of thought, an apprehension of the object as a whole 
and in its details so clear and complete that its nature 
and its “why and wherefore’ are fully understood 
and there are no questions left to be asked. It may 
be objected that we have very little such knowledge, 
if any. True, but its possibility is a pre-supposition 
of all thought, being a corollary of that assumption 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 53 


of the rationality of the universe and man’s capacity 
to apprehend it of which we have spoken. It may be 
that it is a goal and an ideal rather than a present 
possession of mankind. All the more is it necessary 
to avoid confusing it with faith and claiming that 
the believer has it already. 

Though knowledge be but a goal and an ideal, 
nevertheless it is the conceivable possible state of 
mind by reference to which alone all other states of 
mind such as questioning, doubt, conjecture, opinion, 
and belief can be understood. One and all they 
denote different species of that which is not knowledge. 
If we knew we should not say, ‘ I believe.’ 

The distinguishing mark of belief is surely that it 
is the opinion on which a man decides to act. Man is 
not merely an intellectual being in quest of knowledge ; 
he has to act as well as to think, to live his life in 
relation to his fellow-men, the beasts, the birds, and 
all the furniture of earth and heaven. For this he 
needs principles of action. Knowledge alone could 
fully satisfy these needs, but that is not to be had. 
In default of it he must have a creed ; opinions which 
he manifests as beliefs by basing his actions upon them, 
staking his life upon the truth of that which cannot 
be proved. 

In this way there can come to all men a very real 
pragmatic verification or criticism of their creeds. 
It is not that to be true is the same as to answer in 
practice; but the harmony of the universe involves 
that that which is true shall also satisfy the test of 
being lived by. This method of verification is open 


54 THE PLACE OF REASON 


to all, and there are countless Christians who have 
learned for themselves the meaning of the words 
‘ If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples; 
and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make 
you free.’!. The Christian apologist will be all the 
better equipped for his task if this is true of himself, 
and he may justly call attention to the value of the 
Christian faith as witnessed to in the lives of Christians. 
But fundamentally his work is other than this. He 
is aware that lives of the highest nobility and deepest 
devotion can be lived and have been lived as the fruit 
of sincere but mistaken convictions. It is for him to - 
consider not merely the practical value but the 
rationality of the convictions by which he and his 
fellow Christians live, to be the Church’s watchman 
in the defence of her faith against both unbelief and 
credulity. 

I must now attempt to illustrate and justify the 
course of argument followed in these lectures by 
sketching in outline the way in which it seems to me 
that the principles contended for may be and should 
be applied by the Christian apologist. We will 
suppose that the question to be considered is that 
fundamental question for the Christian faith : ‘ What 
think ye of Christ?’ : that our apologist is setting out 
to consider how the Catholic doctrine of the Person 
of Christ stands when tested at the bar of reason. 

‘ Philosophy begins in wonder,’ and our apologist 
will have qualified for his duty by having shared to 
the full that wonder which has driven him to attempt 


1 St. John viii, 32. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 55 


to understand the universe. Being an honest man, 
he will have recognised the fact that as yet philosophy 
not only begins in wonder; it also ends in wonder. 
Bit by bit he will have dug down into the mysteries 
of existence, until he is faced by that most profound 
and baffling of problems, the problem of the relation 
of time and eternity. To that problem he will realise 
that no man has an answer. On the one hand he 
sees the Bergsonians or ‘ progressists’ maintaining 
that the time series is all that there is, that the 
universe itself if not growing better and better every 
day, is at any rate growing, developing, changing. 
These leave his questionings unsatisfied, for they cut 
the knot he is trying to unravel, simply denying the 
existence of that unchanging background whose 
reality is demanded by reason in order to make 
conceivable the fact of change.t. On the other hand 
he sees the monists maintaining that only the un- 
changing eternal is real, that this world of changing 
particulars in time and space has a very doubtful 
status in reality. This again seems to him to cut the 
knot, and to be unsatisfactory in itself: unsatisfactory 
because it gives no reasonable ground for the existence, 
or the illusion of the existence, of this world in time 
and space at all. If the universe be perfect in its 
unchanging eternity, what on earth or in heaven is 
the point of the time series ?—and yet that very 
time series demands the eternal unchanging perfection 
as the ground of its existence and intelligibility. 


1 For a fuller statement of this argument, see Pringle-Pattison, The 
Idea of God in Recent Philosophy, Lecture XIX. (Oxford University 
Press, 1917.) 


56 THE PLACE OF REASON 


When our apologist has once really faced this, 
the deepest puzzle of the universe, he begins to 
recognise how great are the limitations of our know- 
ledge, of which we have spoken in the earlier part of 
this lecture. And he soon finds that the puzzle of 
time and eternity is by no means the only baffling 
mystery in the nature of things. There is also, for 
example, the problem of good and evil. As a philo- 
sopher he is attempting to understand the universe, 
and his first duty is the accurate observation of that 
which he is trying to understand. He finds there 
that he cannot ignore his moral judgments, that one 
of the facts he is trying to understand is the existence 
in this world of things which he distinguishes as 
those which quite rightly exist and those which ought 
not to béithere at iallay VAs in the case of timeyand 
eternity, he finds those who attempt to cut the knot 
of the problem of good and evil by denying the 
reality of one side or the other; but their works seem 
to him unsatisfactory, undue simplifications of the 
puzzle before him. How can there exist time and 
eternity, good and evil in that universe whose rational 
coherence is the pre-supposition of his own and all 
thought? He turns away disappointed from one 
after another of the solutions offered him, until at 
last he stands bowed in reverence in the presence of 
the mystery, as when the voices of his friends ceased 
and Job stood in the presence of God. 

Then he begins to have some respect for the 


1 For a fuller statement of this point see Sorley, Moral Values and the 
Idea of God. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 57 


Christian faith, for he realises that the greatness of the 
Christian faith is simply this, that it has got the 
problems of the universe inside it. It is useless and 
absurd to pretend that there are no difficulties in the 
Christian faith. It bristles with them. But it is 
of the highest importance to recognise the fact that 
the real difficulties of Christianity are not peculiar 
to Christianity, but are difficulties in the nature of 
things, difficulties which face the secular philosopher 
equally with the Christian believer. Faced by the 
difficulties of the doctrines of the Trinity, of Creation, 
of Incarnation, of Atonement, the Christian may be 
tempted to renounce the lot at the supposed call of 
reason. But let him remember that he will not 
abolish his difficulties by abolishing his Christianity. 
In place of the doctrine of Creation he will have to 
face the problem of time and eternity; in place of 
the doctrine of the Atonement he will have to face 
the problem of the relation of good and evil; in 
place of the doctrine of the Incarnation he will have 
to face the historical fact of Christ. On the other 
hand, let not the Christian believer think that he will 
necessarily improve his Creed by simplifying it and 
removing its difficult and mysterious elements. Both 
those who abandon their Christianity on account of 
its difficulties, and those who attempt unduly to 
simplify it are victims of the same illusion. They 
think that there is open to the mind of man a simple 
and satisfactory explanation of the deepest puzzles of 
the universe. In this they shew but the shallowness 
of their own appreciation of those puzzles. 


58 THE PLACE OF REASON 


Our apologist will not make either of these mistakes, 
but will fully realise that if he is to believe in God at 
all, his doctrine of God can be no simple and easy one, 
it must be adequate to this universe in which are 
found the puzzles of time and eternity, of good 
and evil, and many another. He will have reflected 
as deeply as he can on the problem of good and evil, 
and will have seen the reasonableness of the main 
principle involved in the Christian doctrine of the 
Atonement, that in the face of the evil which rears 
its head in the time series, God should take it upon 
Himself to vindicate goodness and neutralise the 
power of evil. In its message that God has done this, 
Christianity minimises neither the primacy of goodness, 
nor the reality and seriousness of evil, nor the impor- 
tance of discovering a relation between them which 
shall explain their co-existence in a rational universe, 
all of which three things are demanded by reason. 

So, sooner or later, our apologist will have faced the 
claims of what we are accustomed to call the Christian 
revelation of God’s activity in history. For him there 
can be no ‘ special revelation ’ which is formally other 
than that self-revelation of God which is involved in 
any discovery of truth.1_ What a scientist has seen 
through the microscope and what he has deduced 
therefrom, what a prophet has seen through the eyes 
of the spirit and what he has deduced therefrom, 
these are samples of what claim to be rational appre- 
hensions of reality by the human mind. So far as it 
is possible in any one life, he has to consider all the 


1 See above, pp. 45-6. 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 59 


aspects of’reality which have been presented to the 
mind of man. In trying to do this he cannot neglect 
the study of history, and in studying history he must 
face the fact of Christ. He will therefore have done 
his best to make himself acquainted with the progress 
of the literary and historical criticism of the Bible, 
and especially of the Gospels and other documents 
dealing with the life of Christ. 

Here he will have been impressed with the fact that 
there are two main divisions into which fall the 
attempts to account for the existence among the 
world’s historical documents of the records of the 
human life of Christ. On the one hand there is the 
traditional teaching of the Christian Church which 
maintains that they record the life on earth of God 
made man, of that Second Person of the Blessed 
Trinity ‘ who for us men and for our salvation came 
down from Heaven and was incarnate.’ On the 
other hand there are a multitude of conflicting theories 
all based on one premise: that, this conception of an 
incarnation of God being irrational and absurd, some 
other explanation must be found to account for the 
‘form in which the records of the life of Jesus of 
Nazareth have come down to us; there must have 
been a merely human historic Jesus, of whose life the 
accurate accounts have been overlaid by the views 
concerning Him which came to prevail among His 
over-enthusiastic and superstitious followers. 

Among the many more or less important attempts 
to disentangle the truth about this postulated historic 
Jesus, our apologist will have noticed the emergence 


60 THE PLACE OF REASON 


during the last hundred or so years of New Testament 
study of two main schools of thought. First there 
was the school which looked upon Jesus as the greatest 
of all moral teachers, but one who made no claims 
Himself to be more than human, let alone divine. 
Where these seem to occur in the Gospel story, they 
are due to the fathering upon Him of beliefs which 
later came to be held by His followers. But secondly 
he will have noticed that other and contrasted school 
of students which owes so much to the impetus given 
by Dr. Albrecht Schweitzer, that school which lays 
stress chiefly on those passages in the Gospel which the - 
former school dismissed most readily as unhistorical, 
which sees in Jesus a fanatic who had got it into His 
head that He was the expected Messiah come to 
herald the end of the world and the establishment of 
the Kingdom of God, and which discounts His moral 
teaching as merely an interimsethik, advice given in 
view of the mistaken belief that only a few more years 
should roll before the catastrophic dissolution of this 
planet and the Day of Judgement. 

Our apologist will have followed to the best of his 
ability the discussions between these two schools, 
and will have tried to study the New Testament for 
himself in the light of those discussions. He will 
have discovered the value of the contribution made 
by the second, or eschatological school, and there will 
gradually have grown up in his mind the conviction 
that the historic Jesus was One who did indeed claim 
to be the expected Messiah, but who thought of 
Himself as called to fulfil the role of the Suffering 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 61 


Servant of Jehovah prophesied by Isaiah, to die for 
the sins of mankind, and only through death to pass 
to victory, to the seeing of the travail of His soul and 
being satisfied, and to the glory of the Son of Man 
who should be the Judge of the world. But he will 
not have been able to dismiss the claims of that other 
school who saw in Christ the greatest moral teacher 
of all time. On the contrary, he will have seen 
that the Messianic conceptions of Jesus Christ were 
through and through controlled by his moral con- 
victions, that it was as representing a God whose 
fundamental characteristics were righteousness and love 
in a world where victory over sin was the only thing 
worth living and dying for that He claimed to be 
Messiah. 

As his studies have proceeded, our apologist will 
have become more and more impressed by two facts 
about the Gospels. In the first place, he will have 
remembered that according to the traditional Christian 
view of them they are the record of the life on earth 
of God made Man in the days of His humiliation, when 
His godhead was veiled. He will have realised that 
on that interpretation it would not, therefore, be 
surprising if in these days of, His humiliation that 
godhead was not apparent and was not recognised 
by His contemporaries, even among His followers. 
The Christian tradition is that He rose from the dead, 
and that only in the light of their experiences after 
the resurrection did Christians come to see the implica- 
tions of what had gone before. If, therefore, we now 
isolate the Gospels from the rest of the New Testament 


62 THE PLACE OF REASON 


and demand that in them shall be found clear evidence 
of the godhead of our Lord, we are demanding that 
which on the traditional Christian hypothesis it is 
impossible to find and absurd to demand. But, 
secondly, our apologist will have become more and 
more convinced that the character of the historic 
Jesus is one which it is impossible adequately to 
explain and account for as representing any known 
type of merely human personality. It is not merely 
that many of the attempts to do so only attain any 
measure of success by ignoring elements in the record 
of His life and teaching which they are unable to | 
assimilate. It is because the attempt to arrive at the 
true Jesus of history presents a character of a certain 
complexity which passes beyond his comprehension, 
the character of One in whose teaching and life our 
apologist finds his moral ideals anticipated in actuality, 
but who nevertheless proclaims as the kernel of His 
message such supernatural conceptions as the advent 
of a Messiah sent by God to die for mankind and 
return in judgement. The moral and eschatological 
elements are warp and woof of the seamless fabric 
of the teaching of Christ. Are we to conclude that 
we have found our moral ideal in a deluded fanatic 
who thought Himself Messiah, whereas in reality 
there could be and can be no such thing; or is it 
possible that He who thought of Himself as Messiah 
really was so, and has died and risen again and is to 
be our Judge? 

The traditional Christian doctrine about Christ 
resulted from accepting this latter alternative, taking 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 63 


Him at His word, and working out in the sphere of 
metaphysics by rational methods what was involved 
in so doing. To put the matter as briefly as possible, 
it was seen that if He had indeed brought atonement 
to a sinful world, then He had performed a work 
which could only be performed by God. But of the 
reality of His manhood history allowed no doubt. 
So in the course of some four or five centuries came 
the formulation of that doctrine which speaks of Him 
as two natures in one Person, and sees in the Gospels 
the record of the life on earth of God incarnate. 

At this point our apologist will remember those 
two mysteries which he has found inherent in the 
nature of things when he attempted to understand 
the universe, the mystery of time and eternity, and 
the mystery of good and evil, and he will ask how the 
historic figure of Jesus Christ will appear in the light 
of these two mysteries. This will lead him to realise 
two things. First, he will realise that the problem 
of that historic Figure is remarkably akin to the 
problem of time and eternity. There, concentrated 
upon one Person and in one life, he finds mirrored 
the deepest mystery of the universe. If indeed the 
Christian Church were right, and that Person were 
God incarnate, then there is explained the mystery 
of that Figure which has so baffled successive attempts 
to explain it. If God were indeed to have become 
incarnate, would not the result have been just such 
as that life which the Gospels record and which passes 
our comprehension, a life whereon is focussed and 
concentrated the profoundest mystery of the universe? 


64 THE PLACE OF REASON 


And, secondly, if he accepts that Christian belief in 
which the empirical facts of history dovetail into the 
philosopher’s apprehension of the problem of the 
universe, he will realise that he is putting his faith 
in a doctrine which is not inadequate to that other 
problem of good and evil. To see in Christ God 
reconciling the world to Himself is a first step towards 
being able to reconcile in thought the existence of 
those two with the rational coherence of the universe. 

So, summing it all up, our apologist will decide 
that it is rational to stake his life upon the belief that 
Christ is God incarnate, and, against the background | 
of the puzzle of the universe, will formulate the four 
fold foundation on which his faith will stand. 

1. The fact of the contrast of goodness and evil 
demands belief in a God who takes it upon Himself 
to make atonement for sin. 

2. In the Gospels we have an historical record of 
One who claimed to be the Servant of Jehovah come 
to give His life for the sins of mankind, and whose 
claim has been justified by the experience of the 
Christian Church. } 

3. In His teaching and in His own life He fulfils 
our moral ideals, our apprehension of what ought to 
be. 

4. That historical Figure is a mystery: how to 
distinguish and understand the relation of divine and 
human in Him is beyond us. But the mystery is, 
as it were, a concentration of the ultimate mystery 
of the universe, the puzzle of time and eternity. 

When we come to the historic Figure of Jesus Christ, 


IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 65 


by careful sifting of our documents and study of His 
times, we arrive at a Figure which passes beyond our 
comprehension. All attempted ‘ explanations’ of 
Him fall short of the reality they attempt to explain. 
All we can say is that His recorded words and actions 
are natural and intelligible if He were God made man. 
But in His manhood He can be known, served, 
worshipped and loved, and as He unites us with 
Himself we learn to say with St. Thomas, ‘ My Lord 
and my God,’ and to find the blessings of those who 
have not seen and yet have believed. It is foolish 
to say, ‘we see’ when we do not, and it is well to 
remember that what the deepest thoughts of the 
greatest minds bring us to is an appreciation of the 
puzzles of the universe, for whose solution we must 
wait till ‘we know even as we are known.’ So let 
me close these lectures by praying, on my own behalf 
and on yours, in the words of St. Paul, that we may 
come ‘ unto all riches of the full assurance of under- 
standing, that we may know the mystery of God, 
even Christ.’ 


ih 
Hak 5; 


‘ irs 
Naat Hn MUAY ANWR NAN Nae Vata VON ! oh] RRS ‘ Si 


Whe 


H 
4 a ai A 
Py Athy 


auth 
aye 


mae 


his i A 

Ga en 

A Alte} MT 
ANI 
iyi 


Wil i ’ 
(nt yeh We 
i) 


’ Nasal 
i 
fi ¥ 


OTT ny tal 
ANA iy AW Wy ahah 
ae aie 


Wart 


i ye NIN if 

WERE aM gota 

h falar ital 

Na LRA 4 

HAUS A aN WK 
Vib, 


iy 
Wi bh Mie 


iy i ee Ny 





Experience, Religious Experience, and 
e ° ° 1 
Christian Experience. 


HAVE been asked in the first place to consider 
‘experience’ in general, and I think we should 
remind ourselves at the outset that the study 

of experience is always a secondary study. It 
involves reflection. The primary object of our 
interest is the world around us. The hands, and 
later the toes, and after that the toys which keep a 
child amused, are all alike parts of its environment. 
In both the child and the race self-consciousness is a 
comparatively late development, and, thank heaven, 
the oldest of us can retain to the end something of that 
objectivity of interest which is characteristic of 
earliest childhood; the old botanist and the old 
mathematician can by the grace of God be interested 
not in themselves, but in plants and in curves. Only 
when the mind turns back upon itself in reflection 
and philosophers and psychologists begin to ask their 
tiresome questions, does the study of experience 
begin. So, too, the saint is conscious primarily of 
God, and the study of his religious experience is a 
secondary study in which he may have little or no 
interest at all. Happy indeed for him if he has none ! 
We shall do well at the outset of our Conference to 
remind ourselves of this secondary character of the 
study of experience, and, since to be forewarned is 


* The opening paper read at the Joint Conference of the Anglican and 
Free Church Fellowships in April, 1923. 


68 EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


to be forearmed, to warn ourselves of a possible 
danger inherent in this study—the danger of becoming 
over-introspective, and of ceasing to think directly 
and deeply about God, sin, and redemption, because 
we are wholly occupied with our own religious ex- 
periences. I sometimes think that Miss Evelyn 
Underhill is a writer whose works lead us into danger 
in this way. I am not at all convinced of the truth 
of her main thesis, that it is open to us all to share the 
experiences of the mystics: still less am I convinced 
that by studying those experiences and striving to 
have similar ones we shall achieve that end. Here 
I should like to. mention a book by another woman 
writer whose insight seems to me to be deep and true, 
a novel which well illustrates the points that I think 
Miss Underhill overlooks. In Green Apple Harvest 
Miss Sheila Kaye Smith gives a penetrating study 
of two types of religious experience in two brothers. 
In Bob you have the mystic saint, in Clem the saint 
of more ordinary parts and passions. Now I do not 
believe that Clem could ever have shared the mystic 
experience of Bob, nor that either of these would 
have been what they were had they been students of 
‘religious experience.’ Clem’s study was the kindly 
service of those around him, Bob’s soul was athirst 
for the living God, and could find no rest until it 
rested in Him. 

But the philosopher can no longer be restrained 
from interrupting with his questions. ‘ Excuse me,’ 
he has been trying to say for some minutes, ‘ are you 
not taking for granted what is very questionable, 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 69 


that there are truths about God, sin, and redemption 
et hoc genus omne, which remain what they are apart 
from the experience of them which men have? Have 
we not learned since the time of Kant that the way in 
which we experience anything depends upon not 
merely the nature of the thing itself, but the mind 
with which we apprehend it? Thus the artist may 
only see beauty where the farmer sees but ground 
that looks suitable for the plough, and the soldier 
nothing but a number of tactical problems. Each of 
us has his own world that he lives in. We know 
nothing, and can know nothing, of God as He is in 
- Himself, but only of what men have told us of their 
experiences of God. Is not then the study of religious 
experience, so far from being a secondary study, the 
one and only way in which we can approach the 
thought of God?’ Such reasoning is referred to by 
two of the younger Oxford scientists in the current 
number of the Hibbert ‘fournal4 It is explicitly 
accepted with due acknowledgment to Kant by 
Dr. J. S. Haldane, while Mr. Julian Huxley says 
‘The need for some external, ascertainable basis for 
belief . . . is leading the representatives of Christianity 
to lay even greater stress upon the reality and prag- 
matic value of religious experience, less and less upon 
dogmas and creeds.’ | 
Now clearly to deal adequately with this question 
would require that not merely the whole of this paper 
but that the whole of this Conference should be devoted 
to the discussion of the philosophical problem of the 
1 April, 1923. 


70 EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


theory of knowledge. All I can say here is that, for 
myself, I believe the acceptance of this distinction 
between God as He is in Himself and God as He 
can be known entirely misrepresents the activity of 
human reason, cuts at the roots of human thought in 
science and religion, and must lead ultimately not to 
a basis for belief, but to a bottomless scepticism. 
I can only account for its unquestioning adoption by 
the two scientists I have referred to by the fact that 
the growing specialisation in our labours has tended 
to hinder those who are devoted to the study of 
natural science from familiarity with the progress of - 
philosophical enquiry, so that they are unfamiliar 
with the manner in which that particular element in 
the Kantian system has been undermined by later 
philosophical criticism.t Having said that, I would 
ask you now to approach with me the main subject 
of our thought, and to ask just what we mean by this 
word ‘ experience.’ 

There was a certain famous editor of The Times 
who strongly objected to his journalists making use 
of the phrase ‘ took place.’ It was evidence, he said, 
of looseness of thought, of a laziness which would not 
trouble to find the appropriate verb for each event. 
They should have said that a race was run, or a 
meeting held, or a marriage solemnised. The word 
‘experience’ is similarly a conveniently vague term 
which will cover a multitude of different kinds of 
experiences. Our first duty, then, must be to recog- 


*Cf., eg., Mr. Prichard’s Kant’s Theory of Knowledge. 
(Clarendon Press, 1909.) 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 71 


nise this fact, and to ask what these different things 
have in common that one word should come to be 
used for all. Now to have an experience may mean 
to think, and in thinking—to doubt, to question, to 
believe, to know; or to feel—to love or to hate, or 
to have toothache or to eat a meringue; or to act— 
to get up or to go to bed, or to go for a walk, or to 
read a paper, or to listen toa paper. But in all these, 
if we are to have an experience, we must be con- 
scious—consciousness is the common element in all 
which makes them experiences. An unconscious 
experience is a contradiction in terms. Only a 
conscious being can have an experience, and an 
experience is an event in a conscious life. So to 
experience is to be conscious. 

To be conscious we must be conscious of something. 
We are never conscious without there being some 
content of our consciousness. Now the content of 
our consciousness may be something purely subjective, 
such as a feeling or a taste; or it may be something 
objective, as when we apprehend a truth or a duty. 
It is the latter of these that we are to think about 
now, the states of consciousness in which men claim 
to be in touch with a reality existing independently 
of themselves, of which they are conscious. 

In every such experience there must be two 
elements: the conscious subject of the experience, 
and that which is experienced. The word ‘ experience’ 
is used for the whole, but when we desire. to study 
experiences and to distinguish different kinds of 
experience, we must remember that they can be 


72 EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


differentiated in respect to either element. Ex- 
periences may differ on the subjective side, as being 
different forms of activity on the part of the subject, 
e.g. believing, doubting, being convinced of, loving, 
hating, devoting oneself, etc. Or they may differ 
on the objective side, as being experiences of tempta- 
tion, of encouragement, of the presence of God, of the 
power of Christ, etc. 

That is all I shall say about experience in general, 
by way of introduction to religious experience and 
Christian experience. Two main points have emerged. 
First, that we must beware of using the word ‘ ex- 
perience ’ as a conveniently vague expression to avoid 
the trouble of accurately determining what kind of 
experience we are dealing with, determining it both 
on the subjective and on the objective side. Secondly, 
we see that we cannot substitute the study of 
experience for that of metaphysics, since to study an 
experience on its objective side must include the study 
of what is experienced, which includes among other 
things the subject matter of metaphysical enquiry. 
If this be so, ‘ to lay stress,’ as Mr. Huxley puts it, 
‘on the reality and pragmatic value of religious 
experience rather than on dogmas and creeds,’ so 
far from leading to ‘some external, ascertainable 
basis for belief,’ is a counsel of despair, a counsel 
involving a scepticism which despairs of the possibility 
of apprehending truth and formulating it in dogma 
or creed. 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 73 


Reticious EXPERIENCE. 

From what has been said, it might seem at first sight 
that it would be quite easy to define religious exper- 
ience. All we have to do is to.ask on the one hand 
what objects of experience are religious objects, and 
on the other, what activities of our consciousness are 
religious activities. But the matter is not so simple, 
for in an actual experience there is such a fusion of 
subjective and objective that the separation of them 
according to the demands of logic is by no means 
easy. There is here a truth borne witness to by that 
distinction between God as He is and God as He is 
known, to which I have referred—a truth which we 
must not deny in rejecting that distinction as it has 
been drawn. This will become clearer as we go on. 

Let us suggest to begin with that on the objective 
side what we mean by religious experience is experience 
of God. Now the difficulty is, that whether or no a 
particular experience is an experience of God depends 
largely on the subjective element. In the Bible there 
are many accounts of men who looked on dreams as 
messages from God. To-day there are many men 
who would leave God out of the explanation of such 
events, and explain them in psychological terms. 
Again, one man might find God speaking to him in an 
illness, while another might explain his disease by 
natural causes and attach to it no religious significance. 
It would seem, then, that commonly it is not the 
objective thing experienced that is religious: the 
religious character is attached to it in the experience 
by the interpretation given to it by the subject of 


F 


74. EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


the experience. We might be inclined here to formu- 
late a rule, and say that the same experience occurring 
to different persons may be taken differently. It 
would be more accurate to say that the experiences 
are not the same, but that in two experiences, while 
the objective element may be the same, differences 
due to the subject may cause the one experience to 
be religious while the other is not. What makes an 
experience religious is the way in which it is taken 
by the subject. Thus to St. Paul stripes, stones, 
shipwrecks, and thorns in the flesh were religious 
experiences, while to Judas Iscariot the daily com- 
panionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not. 

It is, then, to the interpretation by the subject of 
the objective element in his experiences that our 
attention must be directed. I believe this to be 
extremely important in considering the formulation 
of Christian doctrine. Think, for instance, of the 
doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I do not suppose that 
the experiences which befell the early Christians in 
New Testament times were, on the objective side, 
different from occurrences to-day. Only they were 
interpretated on the basis of a belief in the activity 
of the Spirit of God. That belief fused with the 
objective element to form a single hardly analysable 
experience of the power of the Spirit. 

It is, I say, the interpretation to which our attention 
must be directed. Now that interpretation will 
depend on our general outlook on things, our weltan- 
schauung, or view of the universe. Now we can come 
to real grips with the question whether there must be a 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 75 


distinction between God as He is in Himself, and God 
as He is experienced, whether it is impossible to pass 
from the small world of our own experiences to the 
apprehension of reality, whether we can only say 
‘I experience God as Love,’ and never ‘ God zs Love.’ 

Now the very fact that we discuss things at all 
implies the presupposition that we are not each shut 
up within the world of his or her experiences, but 
that truth is attainable. Were human minds in- 
capable of achieving any knowledge of God as He is, 
attendance at this Conference would be a waste of 
time and money. How are we to avoid this, seeing 
that God’s manifestation of Himself is at the mercy, 
so to speak, of the interpretation put upon it by those 
who receive it in their experience ? How can we take 
precautions against misinterpreting the truth in the 
process of apprehending it? 

We interpret our experiences in the light of our 
general conceptions, of our creed. Now, to state 
baldly what should properly be argued at length, I 
believe that the proper function of our powers of 
reason and conscience is just to see through and pass 
beyond what is particular and temporal in our 
experiences and to lay hold on what is general and 
eternal, on what is true. What we have to see to. is 
that the creed in the light of which we interpret the 
objective element in our experiences is formed by 
reason and conscience. I can see no hope, except 
in trusting reason, conscience and aesthetic judgement 
—the threefold facets of the light which lighteth 


every man that cometh into the world. 


76 EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


- There is, of course, the difficulty that we seem to be 
moving in a circle. The experiences are directed by 
the general conception, while that general conception 
itself is formed from particular experiences. True, 
but is not that the case with all thought ? The ‘ laws’ 
‘of science are generalisations from particular observed 
events, but the events are explained and understood 
scientifically in the light of the ‘laws.’ Again, what 
of our conception of the Christ of the Gospels ? That 
is built up of particular incidents ; but each incident 
is interpreted in the light of the general conception. 
Why else should we not look on the cursing of the. 
barren fig-tree as a discreditable exhibition of bad 
temper? To cut a long story short, what I have to 
say hereis this. Religious experience is the experience 
of life as experienced by men who are religious, 1.e. 
who interpret life on the basis of belief in God. 
Whether or no that interpretation is justifiable 
depends on whether it is reasonable to believe in 
God. We all know what it is to discuss whether belief 
in God is reasonable. Just such discussion, carried 
to a positive conclusion, is the only possible. way of 
reaching ‘ some external, ascertainable basis of belief.’ 
“Without it, no amount of stress laid on ‘ the reality 
-and pragmatic value of religious experience’ will 
avail. It is interesting that Mr. Julian Huxley, after 
the statement which I have ventured to criticise, 
goes on very happily not to lay stress on ‘ the reality 
and pragmatic value of religious experience,’ but to 
develop just such a reasonable argument for belief in 
God as I hold to be necessary to justify religious 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 77 


experience. What is wanted, then, is not the substitu- 
tion of appeals to religious experience for dogmas and 
creeds, but reasonable dogmas and creeds to interpret 
life, and so to produce religious experience. 

I do not wish to say that it is the duty of every man 
and woman to be thinking out the reasonableness 
of their beliefs. We are not all called to this duty, 
and many will always adopt unquestioning the outlook 
in the light of which they interpret and experience 
life. But some are called to this task, and the 
importance and responsibility of their work is seen 
when we reflect that they do as a matter of fact largely 
determine the form in which their brothers and sisters 
will experience God’s manifestation of Himself. And 
the Church, which provides a creed in order to enable 
the experiences of her members to be religious ex- 
periences, must take care that she guides the footsteps 
of her children by the light of the lamp of truth. 

Religious experience, then, is the experience of 
life as experienced by men who are religious, i.e. 
who interpret life on the basis of belief in God. Of 
course even such men will distinguish between 
experiences which seem more or less religious in a 
narrower sense. St. Paul, no doubt, might speak of 
the meeting with Christ on the road to Damascus as 
a ‘religious experience’ of another order from the 
meeting with St. Luke at Troas. But we are bidden 
by our Lord to remember that, inasmuch as we have 
fed or visited the hungry and imprisoned, we have 
fed and visited Him. May not these distinctions 
be due to the imperfections of our saintliness ? Our 


78 EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


eyes are holden so that we cannot behold the omni- 
present God, and do not see ‘ every bush aflame with 
God.’ 

Is religious experience justifiable? Only, I have 
said, when discussion of the reasonableness of belief 
in God has come to a positive conclusion. This is a 
hard saying, for it will not be so till we have been 
long dead, when philosophy reaches its goal and we 
know even as we are known. But now we see 
through a glass darkly ; we must walk by faith and not 
by sight. What does this mean? Finding grounds 
for thinking that belief in God is not unreasonable, 
we make the venture of faith of determining to see in 
all that happens to us the finger of God. As we listen 
for His voice, we hear it, and that which begins as a 
venture of faith becomes through growing experience 
of life a conviction which no argument has power to 
disturb. 


CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 


If religious experience is the experience of life as 
experienced by men who are religious, then Christian 
experience will be the experience of life as experienced 
by men who are Christians. The same objective 
elements being presented to them as to others, the 
fact of their interpreting: them in the light of the 
Christian faith will colour all their experience. If 
we turn back to the New Testament, we find there that 
this element of interpretation has to be. taken into 
account. The same Christ appeared to multitudes 
of Jews; He preached the Gospel of repentance, of 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 79 


the love and of the forgiveness of the Divine Father 
through His self-sacrifice ; of the power of the Spirit. 
Some accepted Him as Messiah, their acceptance of 
Him being largely coloured by eschatological con- 
ceptions ; some perhaps accepted Him on the ground 
of His miracles; some on more ethical grounds ; 
some rejected Him and could see in Him no more than 
a man beside Himself, an insane fanatic. In the 
Fourth Gospel Christ is represented as insisting on 
this element of interpretation ; it was because they 
did not know the Father as the prophets of old had 
declared Him, and as their own consciences bore 
witness to Him, that they could not recognise the 
revelation of the Father in the Son. So, too, in the 
Synoptic Gospels great stress is laid on the importance 
of ‘ the single eye,’ and it is to ‘ those who have ears 
to hear’ that Christ looks for the understanding of 
His message. } 

Now from one point of view I do not see why there 
should be any specific Christian experience at all. 
If God is what Christians believe Him to be, the loving 
righteous Father who forgives His erring children 
and enables them to serve Him aright in building the 
Kingdom of God, I do not see why men of other 
religions should not from time to time lay hold on 
this truth, and, in the light of it, experience the call 
to righteousness, the joy of forgiveness and the 
power of the Spirit. But, nevertheless, it was through 
Christ that, generally speaking, mankind has laid 
hold on the manifestation of God’s character as at 
once righteous, redeeming and inspiring, and, more- 


80 EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


~ over, I do not think that it is reasonable to believe 
that God is what Christians believe Him to be unless 
we see in Christ God Himself making atonement for 
the sins of men. An optimistic view of the universe 
seems to me to be at the best a pious hope, unless in 
the death and resurrection of Christ we see God 
Himself dealing with sin in the way of love which is 
atonement. 

If religious experience is the finding of God in all 
the circumstances of life, Christian experience will 
be the finding of The God who is revealed in Christ ; 
still more, the walking in the Spirit, so that one can - 
say: ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ in me.’ The non- 
Christian will find Christ never and nowhere; the 
Christian neophyte sometimes and in some things; 
the saint at all times and in all things. 

Here, again, I find a difficulty in speaking of a 
specific Christian experience, for in Christ is the ideal 
of every man, and just as the fertility of the divine 
mind is shewn in the infinite variety of individual 
selves whom He calls into existence, so Christ will be 
revealed in an infinite variety of manifestations. If 
God does not wish us all to be exactly alike, after the 
manner of the standardised products which are the 
pride of our modern factory system, but each an 
individual self, like the works on each of which is 
lavished the loving care of the craftsman, then in the 
ideal which each of us finds held up before himself, 
and in all that encourages and enables him to attain 
it, Christ will be found as the revelation of God 
working in man by the power of the Spirit. So each 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 81 


of us has his own besetting sin and his own individual 
redemption, for faithlessness to that ideal is the sin 
of sins, and freedom to lay hold on it is the fruit of 
redemption. But how can artist and moralist, 
philosopher and man of action share all in one pre- 
cisely similar ‘ specific Christian experience’? All 
may join in saying such prayers as the seventy-first 
psalm to the ideals of beauty, truth, goodness or 
noble endeavour which it is sin to betray, but the 
manner in which the God who forgives and enables 
is laid hold on in experience may be infinitely various. 

Here we find the real value of the study of religious 
and Christian experience, or rather experiences. It 
prevents our becoming shut up to the narrowness of 
believing that only in this or that way does God reveal 
Himself to man. The wise priest must be ready to 
counsel a multitude of persons, and enable them in the 
multifarious events of life to hear the voice of God, 
and the laity too will do well to share in this priestly 


_ broad-mindedness. 


But how, in all this, if the revelation of God in 
Christ in human experience be so infinitely various, 
can we find the common element, the unity, which 
justifies us in giving to all these experiences the 
common name of Christian? The question reminds 
us of that which troubled the early Christians, who 
were puzzled to know which spirits were to be trusted, 
and were told in the first Epistle of St. John to listen 
to those who acknowledged Jesus Christ. So for us it 
is the historic figure of the Christ of the Gospels that 
is to be the controlling element in our experience. It 


82 EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 


is a wonder of the Incarnation to which attention 
has been drawn more than once by Father Kelly, 
that in the Christ of the Gospels we have the one 
historic Figure which is able, as a matter of fact, 
to make a universal appeal. Judging a priori, we 
might be inclined to think this impossible, but such 
judgement is ruled out by the empirical fact to which 
Father Kelly, with his wide knowledge of the Church 
in the Mission Field, bears witness. All other heroes 
of history may make but a limited appeal, appealing 
to some race or type of men, but in Christ all nations 
and peoples, and all manner of men and women among | 
them, have found their ideal. 

Christian experience, then, is controlled by being 
related to the historic Christ of the Gospels. It is 
the experience of life as experienced by men who are 
Christians, i.e. who interpret life on the basis of belief 
in Jesus of Nazareth as their God, who in the power 
of the Spirit find in every circumstance some new 
revelation of God in Christ. Here is the point of 
the Christian faith, of the dogmas and creeds of 
the Church. Such experience is only justifiable if the 
belief which gives rise to it is a true belief, and hence 
we see that the thought of the Church in the first 
centuries, the centuries in which the dogmas and 
creeds of the Church were being formulated, moved 
in the realm of metaphysics, and was attempting 
to state belief in Christ in the form of a reasonable 
view of the universe, expressed in the philosophical 
language of the day. The essential teaching of the 
Christian creeds is just these two points, that Christ 


AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 83 


is God, and that the Christ who is God is the historical 
Jesus of Nazareth. This is the core of the Christian - 
weltanschauung, or view of the universe, in the light 
of which Christians interpret all that happens to 
them in their lives, which thus makes their experience 
of life Christian experience. 

I very much doubt, if I may say so, if a common 
ground for the reunion of Christendom can ever be 
found by the search for a single common specific 
Christian experience. A single Christian faith, and 
agreement to unite in fellowship in the common 
practice of Christian worship on the basis of that 
faith, seem to me to be aims for which, as being 
possible though yet far off, it is reasonable to strive. 
But when we are united in faith and worship, I think 
we should set no bounds to the possible variety of 
Christian experiences, but should endeavour to learn 
from one another of the infinite richness of the mercies 
of God in Christ Jesus vouchsafed to all sorts and 
conditions of men. It is encouraging to me to find 
that here I have been anticipated by those who have 
drawn up our official programme for this Conference. 
‘The Specific Character of the Christian Experience,’ 
they say, ‘ will be found in the Christian conception,’ 
—in the views of God and man, that is,—‘* which 
Christians hold.’ 

Is Christian experience justifiable? That will 
depend on the truth of the Christian view of the 
universe, of the Christian faith. All that I said, when 
dealing with religious experience in general, about 
the need of thought, and in default of such demon- 


84. EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 


strative proof as only perfect knowledge of all things 
- could give, of the venture of reasonable faith which 
deepens into conviction, I would say again here with 
special reference to Christian belief and practice and 
experience. But let me end with a parable. 

A certain duke is said to have remarked: ‘ The 
other day I dreamed that I was on my feet addressing 
my brother peers in the House of Lords, and when I 
woke up I found that I was addressing my brother 
peers in the House of Lords.’ Now there are those 
to-day who assure us that the Christian faith is a 
fantasy, as it were a dream-projection of our un- 
conscious selves. But perhaps to us dreamers, who 
in this life dream that we walk in the presence of the 
Blessed Trinity with the comradeship of the saints 
and angels, death will be the awakening to find that 
we are indeed walking in the company of angels and 
saints, in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the 
love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. 


Amos, 10, 46 
Anselm, 43 
Aquinas, 43 
Aristotle, 20 


Atonement, The, 57, 58, 63, 80 


Augustine, 43 


Biblical Inspiration, 37, 58 ff. 


Christology, 63, 82-3 


Creation, 57 ‘ 


Creeds, The, 41-3, 82 
Croce, B., 5 


Darwin, 24 
‘ Darwinianism,’ 43 


Einstein, A., 5 

Emotion, 21 ff. 

‘ Eschatological School,’ 60 
Evil, 56 ff., 63, 64 


‘Faculty Psychology,’ 17, 18 
Faith, 53 

Feelings, 21 ff. 

Fourth Gospel, The, 79 


Gnosticism, 38 ff. 
Gore, Bishop, 1, 44, 45 


Haldane, J. S., 69 
Handelismus, 21 
Harnack A. 32 
Huxley, J. S., 69, 72, 76 
Holy Spirit, The, 74 


Immediacy, 2 ff. 
Incarnation, The, 57, 61-3 
Infallibility, 37 
Interimsethtk, 60 
‘Interpermeation,’ 18 ff. 
Isaiah, 40, 61 


Judaism, 32 
Judas Iscariot, 74 


INDEX 


| Kant, 20, 69. 70 


Kaye Smith, S., 68 
Kelly, A. D., 82 


Luke, St., 77 


Messiah, 33 ff., 40 ff., 60 ff. 
Montanists, 44 


Mystery Religions, 37 ff., 42 


‘Numinous, The,’—Lecture I., 
passim, 25 ff., 44 


Otto, R.— Lecture I., passim, 
25, 26, 44, 45 


Paul, St. 38,, 40/699 745-77 
Pelagianism, 46 

Peter, St., 46 

Philo, 37 

Plato, 10, 20 

Prichara; (Ha A72152,70 
Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 55 


Quick, O., 19 


Rashdall, H., 20 
Revelation, 45 ff., 58 ff. 
Ritschl, A., 45 


Schweitzer, A., 60 

Shebbeare, C. J., 11, 21 

‘Son of Man,’ 40, 61 

Sorley, W. R., 12, 56 

‘ Suffering Servant,’ The, 40, 61, 64 


Thomas, St., 65 

Time and Eternity, 55, 58, 63 
Trinity, The, 57 
Underhill, E., 68 


Webb, C. C. J., 46 
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